19 Raw Lessons You Might Need To Learn Again - Mark Manson (4K)

Mark Manson is a writer, entrepreneur, and a New York Times best-selling author. Mark is one of my favorite thinkers. His blog, books, and X account are packed with timeless lessons I come back to again and again. Today, we get to go through some of his best lessons on life, love, and everything that makes us human. Expect to learn how to actually stand up for yourself, what the real process of personal growth looks like, what it takes to actually cultivate confidence, why it’s impossible for someone who destroys your mental health to be the love of your life, why feeling like you have no idea what you’re doing is the price of entry to achieving your dreams, why you should learn to trust people more, and much more... - 00:00 How To Set Better Boundaries 11:29 Why It’s Important To Focus On Yourself First 18:13 The Real Lessons Of Personal Growth 30:05 You Can Choose To Not Be Afraid Anymore 40:07 Stop Pretending To Be Someone You’re Not 51:01 Your True Love Will Only Improve Your Life, Not Worsen It 58:46 Start Something, Even If You Have No Idea What You’re Doing 1:13:24 The Most Important Productivity System 1:27:33 What Actually Makes People Happy 1:39:41 How To Learn To Trust People More 1:46:52 The Benefits Of Killing Your Ego 2:00:49 How To Encourage Better Behaviour 2:10:56 Find Out More About Mark - Get 35% off your first subscription on the best supplements from Momentous at https://livemomentous.com/modernwisdom Get up to $350 off the Pod 5 at https://eightsleep.com/modernwisdom Get a Free Sample Pack of LMNT’s most popular Flavours with your first purchase at https://drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom Get a 20% discount on Nomatic’s amazing luggage at https://nomatic.com/modernwisdom - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic here - https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Chris Williamson?

  Well, you're laughing at Mark.

• 0:06Mark Manson?

  Your, your business idea, it was just incredible.

• 0:08Chris Williamson?

  Thank you.

• 0:09Mark Manson?

  I'm still thinking about it.

• 0:10Chris Williamson?

  It's, I'm unable to speak about my million billion dollar idea.

• 0:15Mark Manson?

  Yes, is that because you don't want anybody to steal it or because you, you would never be allowed to speak again?

• 0:20Chris Williamson?

  Uh, it's a combination of both.

• 0:21Mark Manson?

  Okay.

• 0:22Chris Williamson?

  But look.

• 0:24Mark Manson?

  The world will wait.

• 0:25Chris Williamson?

  The world is gonna have to wait, but when it happens, it's gonna know about it and Andrew Huberman is as well.

• 0:29Mark Manson?

  Yes, for sure.

• 0:31Chris Williamson?

  All right.

• 0:33Chris Williamson?

  Controversial opinion.

• 0:34Mark Manson?

  Okay.

• 0:35Chris Williamson?

  People would need less therapy if they tolerated fewer assholes.

• 0:40Mark Manson?

  Yeah, I think.

• 0:45Mark Manson?

  So I hear, I hear problems from a lot of people. I get a lot of emails. And I have for a long, for almost 20 years now. And uh, it's amazing to me.

• 0:57Mark Manson?

  How often people will, will email me or message me about some issue that's going on in their life. And really, it just comes down to like, somebody in your life is a dick. And yet, instead of just being like, you know what, I'm not gonna hang out with a dick anymore. I'm gonna try to change their dickishness. I'm gonna try to, to manipulate it or control it or convince them or have them see the light and understand their own dickitude and it's. It's just like such a losing battle. And of course, they always, you know, the, the, the email that comes in is like eight pages long and it has a full biography of every, every party involved. And I'm just like, well, what, maybe just like, don't call them back.

• 1:39Mark Manson?

  Like, is it that hard? So I, I, I just, and, and, and when you, when, this doesn't even get into the therapy culture thing, you know, like especially when you get on Instagram and you start seeing all these posts about, you know, like, uh, you know, if they don't, if they don't appreciate you at your worst, then they don't deserve you at your best. You know, it's like, life's hard. People don't get along, like some people are, are disagreeable and some people are going through shit and they'll say mean things to you and like, at a certain point, you just, there's a skill set of deciding what is acceptable and what's not acceptable in your life. And you can either develop that skill set or you can just continue to be subjected to the whims and the asshole nation of the people around you.

• 2:22Chris Williamson?

  What do you think of the contributing skills of that skill set?

• 2:27Mark Manson?

  So I think, I think one reason people get stuck in this is like, one is just a scarcity mindset around relationships, right? So you often hear scarcity mindset around like business and money and all this stuff. And all that stuff is true, but like, a lot of people have a scarcity mindset around relationships. They think like, oh, if I stop hanging out with half my friends, then I'm just never gonna have friends again. Where it's like, no, there's an abundance of people in the world. And the way life works is that when somebody exits your life, generally, somebody new will show up and do time to, to kind of fill that role.

• 3:01Mark Manson?

  So I think that's one. I think two is just like the courage to speak up or the courage to stand up for yourself. A lot of people don't feel, I don't know what the word is, like, that they have permission to like, express what they feel or express that they feel that they've been disrespected.

• 3:20Mark Manson?

  And I also think that a lot of people develop some sort of like codependent emotional attachment to, to people around them, right? They, they have, they have, their self-esteem is lodged in the minds and mentalities of others. And so If you're not okay, I'm not okay. Exactly. And so the idea of like excising you from my life is, is literally like psychological suicide. Exactly. So it's just not even an option that occurs to them.

• 3:51Mark Manson?

  So yeah, it's like, it's such a simple thing, yet so many people struggle so deeply with it. Which, I mean, I sometimes joke with my team that like, my whole job is just

• 4:04Mark Manson?

  telling people obvious things in a way that like, doesn't feel so difficult. Because like, most life problems are actually extremely simple and basic. You know, it's like, how, how do you, how do you break up with somebody? It's like, well, you just say like, I don't want to be with you anymore. But like, that is so emotionally hard and painful. And, you know, most, most of these life issues that I deal with or that, that I write about, it's just, it's extremely simple actions that are laden with so much emotional.

• 4:35Mark Manson?

  Attachments and neuroticism around it.

• 4:38Chris Williamson?

  It clouds your ability to see just how simple the problem is. I think with the breaking up with someone thing, how many times in history, what, what percentage of breakups have used the sentence, I just don't want to be with you anymore? That sounds so fucking unsophisticated.

• 4:57Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 4:57Chris Williamson?

  It sounds so shallow. It sounds flippant. It's blasé. It's, it's not very empathetic. If you are, if you've got even a fucking hint of scarcity mindset or uncertainty about your future and you say to somebody, I just don't want to be with you anymore. Does this fear of karmic retribution?

• 5:18Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 5:18Chris Williamson?

  Oh, the universe is going to come and get me. I didn't have, it wasn't because the, I worked until my health fucking fell apart and then, and then mum, I needed to help my mother with her. You know, you need this cosmic weight of justification as opposed to your offering of love is simply just not what I want.

• 5:40Mark Manson?

  Well, the irony here too, is that generally people who are in bad relationships or like unhealthy relationships, one of the reasons they're unhealthy is that there's a running scorecard that's going on. So there's this like running tally in each person's head of like, well, I did this thing for you and I did this other thing for you and you never did this thing for me. And when I was here, like you weren't, you weren't there to support me. And like, there's just like a scoreboard that's always being calculated. And what those people don't realize is that it's the scoreboard itself that is the problem. It's not that one person is like quote unquote, winning or losing. And so I think when it comes time to like, somebody's like, wants to break up or wants to end a friendship or, you know, stop speaking to a family member or whatever, they're thinking

• 6:25Mark Manson?

  of it in terms of the scoreboard. They're like, well, I just need to show this person that my score, like I'm winning the scoreboard right now. And if they-

• 6:33Chris Williamson?

  It's unjustified in my departure.

• 6:35Mark Manson?

  Exactly. So if they understand that, then they'll understand why I'm like, not going to be their friend anymore. And it's like, well, no dude, like the scoreboard's actually the problem in the first, like the fact that you feel a need to keep score in the first place means it's a shitty friendship.

• 6:49Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I- I am also concerned about the therapy language culture. The self pathologization on Instagram that somebody wasn't mean to you, they were narcissistic, that this wasn't a bad experience, it's caused you trauma, that you're not sad, you've got depression. And in other ways, you think, well, fuck me, it wasn't that long ago that men, and maybe women too, were just totally in fucking denial of any mental health issues. So it seems like we're incapable of sitting in some nice gray area of good balance in the middle that we can just go from, no, no, everything's fine, you know, work until I get PTSD.

• 7:31Chris Williamson?

  Or even the most sort of micro displeasure is a huge supernova event.

• 7:38Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 7:41Mark Manson?

  I actually, I forget where I read it, but I read, it was actually in a research paper where a psychologist at the APA was talking about how he believed that simultaneously people were both under diagnosed and over diagnosed. And, and the way he explained it is he was like, there's a population of, say, people with depression and anxiety, and within that population of people with depression, anxiety, not enough of them are being diagnosed, like the majority of them are not diagnosed. But then if you look at the circle of people who are being diagnosed.

• 8:17Chris Williamson?

  Many of them do not have depression.

• 8:18Mark Manson?

  Exactly. Exactly. So there's just like, there's like this Venn diagram of like people who are diagnosed and people who actually have the thing, and there's only a little bit of overlap going on between them.

• 8:27Chris Williamson?

  Wow. Yeah, that's cool. Yeah, dude, I, I think the courage to say to yourself, my needs or my wants are legitimate, is oddly a skill set, because we would think, we're often told about how people aren't that pro-social, they often put themselves ahead of others. And in some ways, in certain situations, perhaps to strangers, perhaps to people that we can't see or don't see in certain ways, you know, we can cut in line of somebody at a traffic junction, or we can, you know, be, get more creative with our taxes than we should do, or, you know, obviously not something that I do.

• 9:12Mark Manson?

  Cut that.

• 9:13Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, well, the I R, I am, I am under the scrutiny of the IRS now, but yeah.

• 9:19Mark Manson?

  You, we could talk, I've been there, we could talk about that.

• 9:21Chris Williamson?

  Oh, well, okay, I need to know about this. What happened?

• 9:24Mark Manson?

  I've been audited three times, yeah.

• 9:26Chris Williamson?

  You've been audited, so that means that some guy with a pencil and a pad of paper comes in and looks at every receipt, every, everything?

• 9:34Mark Manson?

  Okay, so principally, yes. In practicality, no.

• 9:42Mark Manson?

  See, when I got audited, just a little backstory of my career, I had a hit, for people listening, I had a hit book. It went absolutely supernova, you know, so my income basically like 100 xed in like two or three years, which obviously tripped some red flags at the IRS.

• 10:00Chris Williamson?

  What'd they think you were doing?

• 10:01Mark Manson?

  I don't know. I'd like, well, and then there's all that you get in all this weird stuff about like, you know, territories, right? Like, so it's like royalties are taxed differently in different states.

• 10:10Chris Williamson?

  Oh, how many books did you sell in the United Arab Emirates and how much was in Hawaii versus Idaho?

• 10:16Mark Manson?

  Yeah, exactly. So it's, it's like, there's a lot of bullshit like that, but um, so when the initial audits came in, I was absolutely terrified, right? Because it's like, this is my worst nightmare.

• 10:27Mark Manson?

  This is gonna be awful. And then

• 10:30Mark Manson?

  after the first call with the IRS agent, I remembered something like very fortuitous, which was that government employees have no fucking clue what they're doing. And so, so the, the, the audit, like-

• 10:45Chris Williamson?

  I, just for anybody else that's still listening from the IRS or all of the people from the IRS, I don't think that at all. That was a sentence that Mark said. I think that you're perfectly competent and really should, should apply your resources, your very well-resourced resources outside of this room.

• 11:00Mark Manson?

  Yeah, I must have just gotten the one bad one, I'm sure, I'm sure. But um, yeah, they didn't look at anything. And actually hilariously, the error, the, they found an error that my old CPA made and it worked in my favor. So I actually profited from my IRS audits.

• 11:17Chris Williamson?

  All three of them?

• 11:18Mark Manson?

  All three of them.

• 11:19Chris Williamson?

  Wow.

• 11:19Mark Manson?

  I made like- Almost 200K from my IRS.

• 11:23Chris Williamson?

  Let's fucking go. Thank you, IRS. Wow. Actually, maybe I should be audited.

• 11:26Mark Manson?

  Yeah. Audit me more.

• 11:28Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Okay, but we do things to people that we don't know. We often put ourselves ahead of them.

• 11:35Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 11:35Chris Williamson?

  However, it seems like with the people who should have our best interests at heart, the people with whom we have given the most of ourselves, invested our time, our energy.

• 11:50Chris Williamson?

  It's very difficult to put ourselves first. We often subjugate our needs in place of somebody else. I'm not going to upset them. Because if I upset them, that something.

• 12:02Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 12:02Chris Williamson?

  The fucking syntax stops there. It just falls off a cliff. If I upset them, then catastrophe, disaster, something bad will occur.

• 12:11Mark Manson?

  Yeah. I mean, it's a little bit paradoxical. And there's a cliche, and it's a cliche for a reason, because it's true, which is, you know, it's the old, put on your own oxygen mask first before you try to help somebody else. And I mean, relationships fundamentally function that way, where it's like, you have to have a healthy relationship with yourself and your own self-worth before you're able to really kind of contribute and give in a healthy way to anybody else. And the same is true vice versa. So like, if you grow up in an environment with two parents who are emotionally dysfunctional, right? They're going to be deriving their self-worth and validation from you or from somebody else. And so they're not going to give you like the nurturing and support and everything that

• 12:53Mark Manson?

  you need to grow up and be healthy yourself and learn how to put your own mask on yourself. So it becomes kind of this, this chain reaction that goes down through generations. And it's weird, because it's like, if you're talking to somebody who's like, never had an oxygen mask on in their life, and you try to explain to them like, what an ox, like, why they need an oxygen mask, like, they don't understand what you're talking about.

• 13:15Chris Williamson?

  What do you mean, look after myself?

• 13:16Mark Manson?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 13:16Chris Williamson?

  What does that mean?

• 13:17Mark Manson?

  Yeah, it's like, you're almost like speaking a different language. But, and it is paradoxical when you tell people to like, put yourself first, because that sounds completely antithetical to like, what a healthy, loving relationship looks like from the outside. But like, from the outside, a healthy relationship is like, two people who are voluntarily giving themselves to each other, like. Consistently and perpetually. But on the inside, what a healthy relationship feels like is like. You are satisfied with yourself and because you're satisfied with yourself, your cup is overflowing. And so you're happy to like, just hand off.

• 13:54Chris Williamson?

  I literally used this analogy with two girls, one Bible the other day, which was. You don't serve people from your cup, you serve them from the source of the overflows around your cup.

• 14:03Mark Manson?

  Ah, nice.

• 14:04Chris Williamson?

  And it's true, like, I mean, look. That's not necessarily. True all the time. You can have a half full cup and be like, yo, let's take it down to a quarter, please have some.

• 14:16Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 14:16Chris Williamson?

  But it's not good.

• 14:17Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 14:17Chris Williamson?

  It's not a good strategy.

• 14:18Mark Manson?

  No, and it's, yeah, it it backfires. I mean, I'll give you a tangible example, so.

• 14:26Mark Manson?

  My wife and I, we have a friend and she's.

• 14:31Mark Manson?

  Biological clock's ticking, right? She wants to find a husband. Great woman, super smart, you know, beautiful, everything. But she really wants to find a husband and like, it's actually. She's starting to panic and so what she's doing is she's like adapting her entire life to like finding a husband. Like, it's like. She's gotten rid of her hobbies and now she's like, she's going to the gym all the time and she's like, just.

• 14:54Chris Williamson?

  Improv classes and salsa dancing.

• 14:56Mark Manson?

  It's like, everything is optimized to like, find Mr. Right. And as a result, she's kind of killed her own personality. Like, she has no more interest for herself. She's no free time for herself. She has no, she's not doing anything for herself anymore. And ironically, it's like, she's meeting tons of guys and obviously. It's not going anywhere. Why? Because she has no fucking personality. Her cup's not overflowing, she's trying to give everything away all the time. And. You see this, I mean, it happens on both genders, but. It's, it's like a self defeating. It's just a paradoxical thing. It's like, the more you you cultivate yourself. The the more you'll kind of become magnetic towards others.

• 15:36Chris Williamson?

  I love the insight, in order for art to imitate life, you have to live a life.

• 15:40Mark Manson?

  Yeah, you have to have a life in the first place.

• 15:41Chris Williamson?

  Or else, it's the same reason that comedians who get successful. Start only talking about airports and dinners and backstage.

• 15:51Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 15:51Chris Williamson?

  Because that's all you know.

• 15:53Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 15:53Chris Williamson?

  You don't, you don't do, Whitney Cummings told me this story, it's so fucking good. So she's in the writer's room in chief boss bitch mode, maybe five years ago, 10 years ago, something. And she's just, you know, million plates spinning all at once, classic sort of, I, I'm, I'm gonna do it myself, woman. And they're in the writer's room for some sitcom thing that she's working on. And they say, it's a Saturday morning, where is she? Talking about whatever this next scene is. And someone went, she's a baby shower. And when it was like, no one goes to a baby shower on a Saturday, fucking stupid idea. They're like, oh, okay, well, um, where else is she? She's a wine tasting. She's like, no one goes to a wine tasting. And they're like, no, Whitney, you don't go to wine tastings. And you don't go to baby showers. That's precisely what normal people do.

• 16:37Mark Manson?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 16:38Chris Williamson?

  And you can't see that. And I suppose it does show up in that way as well. You don't want to just be interested in the other person. You want to be interesting yourself. And most people get the balance wrong in one way or the other. They're way too self-focused, they're way too other-focused.

• 16:56Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 16:56Chris Williamson?

  And because it's difficult, it's, it's difficult to have that, that tolerance between the two.

• 17:01Mark Manson?

  I wonder if that's why like celebrities date each other, because like they have no life.

• 17:06Chris Williamson?

  Or we can bond over our mutual non-lives.

• 17:08Mark Manson?

  Yeah, exactly, exactly.

• 17:10Chris Williamson?

  All right, next one.

• 17:11Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 17:11Chris Williamson?

  If your workouts feel flat, your recovery's slow, or you've just been feeling off, might not be your training plan or your diet. It might be something a bit more boring, like your testosterone. So if you're not performing in the gym or the bedroom, the way that you would like, or you just want to improve your testosterone naturally. Tom Catalli is a fantastic, research-backed place to start. And when it's stacked with zinc, this can make a huge improvement to your testosterone production, your strength, your recovery and your energy. Which is why I'm such a massive fan of Momentous Zinc. It supports testosterone, boosts vitality and helps keep everything running like it should. And if you're still unsure, Momentous offers a 30-day money-back guarantee. So you can buy it, use it every single day for 29 days. And if you don't love it, they'll give you your money back. Plus, they ship internationally.

• 17:54Chris Williamson?

  Right now, you can get 35% off your first subscription and that 30-day money-back guarantee by going to the link in the description below. Or heading to livemomentous.com-modernwisdom and using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout. That's L I V E M O M E N T O U S dot com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. Personal growth is the process of learning to lie to ourselves less.

• 18:17Mark Manson?

  Mm hmm.

• 18:19Mark Manson?

  Yeah, I think, you know, these, these simple truths that because they are so simple, we, but painful, we find ways to avoid them and deny them and pretend that they're not there. And

• 18:34Mark Manson?

  like, if you just take the self-worth piece, right? Like,

• 18:39Mark Manson?

  it's,

• 18:42Mark Manson?

  it's hard to accept that you're just not standing up for yourself, that you don't feel like you deserve respect or trust or time or attention. That's a very painful thing to sit with. So you make up all sorts of stories and narratives and bullshit, you know, it's like, oh, well, women are all like this and it's the fucking phones and well, the political thing and, you know, schools these days, like it's whatever, whatever your, your like little pet thing is, you just start stacking these narratives on top of each other, just to hide that like simple fact that like,

• 19:23Mark Manson?

  like, yeah, you don't feel like you deserve it. And,

• 19:28Mark Manson?

  and so I, what I tend to find,

• 19:32Mark Manson?

  both with myself and with a lot of the people I talk to is, is that, you know, especially, you know, coming from self-help, which is the world that I'm, I guess technically a part of, everything's marketed as, you know, here's the secret. Oh, if you just come to the seminar, learn these three things and you're gonna like fix all your bullshit. And I just find it's never about learning something. It's about like unlearning things. It's about like unwinding the bullshit you've told yourself.

• 20:02Chris Williamson?

  There's a idea I spoke about with Naval, which was cultivated selfishness or like holistic

• 20:11Chris Williamson?

  self-prioritization. But there's also another one of cultivated stupidity, which is many of the problems are you going, it's the story of the alchemist, right? You, you go around the houses to come back to the place that you were at the very start.

• 20:27Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 20:28Chris Williamson?

  And to realize, huh. The issue was that I had assholes in my life and I just needed to stop talking to them. The issue was that I just didn't love my partner that much anymore and I needed to break up with them. The issue was that I wasn't that fired up at my job and so many of these are to do with quitting.

• 20:44Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 20:44Chris Williamson?

  Right, that to do with letting go.

• 20:45Mark Manson?

  Yep.

• 20:45Chris Williamson?

  Very few of them has to do with change in in taking on something new, typically you're letting go of something else. I I don't like the town or country that I live in and I need to just have the bravery to make the change and go somewhere else.

• 21:01Chris Williamson?

  And you have lied to yourself and tried to justify and obfuscate as a way to escape from the difficult decision and you've started to layer all of these different compensatory mechanisms on top and stories that you've told yourself and now you have to dig down through them all.

• 21:19Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 21:20Chris Williamson?

  Go, okay, was it this thing? Was it? Was it? Was it the self? Well, I was therapy. I must go to therapy. I must find out why I have this attachment style. And it's like, no, you just don't fucking love your partner that much anymore. And you used to and you feel guilty.

• 21:35Mark Manson?

  Also, you you start to see kind of these compulsive patterns show up in people because it's like.

• 21:41Mark Manson?

  So like a narrative I had for a long time, right, was just.

• 21:45Mark Manson?

  I I lived as a nomad for about seven and a half years and

• 21:51Mark Manson?

  I kind of, I started to get in my head when I started living in all these different countries, I started getting in my head that there's like an optimal place to live and the only thing that that created for me was a desire to constantly be somewhere else.

• 22:05Chris Williamson?

  Dissatisfaction.

• 22:06Mark Manson?

  Yeah, no matter where I was, it was like, something's not optimal. I should be somewhere else and it really started to wear on me after a certain amount of time. And really, like, all that was underneath all of that was just simply a a fear of committing to a a place in a community, like that was there the the entire time is just like this fear of like. I was in my twenties. It was time to be a grown up, time to be an adult, you know, time to set roots and like pick a path in life. And looking back now as an older man, like I can understand that I didn't have the courage to do that yet. And so I created all this narrative around like, well, I gotta go find like the optimal place before I sit down. And but to find the place, I really got enmeshed in the culture.

• 22:50Mark Manson?

  And so I should probably study some languages and, you know, I should probably split my time between these three different continents, maybe a year each and maybe pick the five best countries per continent. And like, let me start researching all that, you know, and it's like, there goes like four years of my life. And uh, don't get me wrong, I had a great time, I learned a ton of stuff. But like, a lot of it was driven by this avoidance of a very simple truth of like, I wasn't ready to grow up. And as long as I'm on the road and like always booking a plane to somewhere else, I don't really have to grow up. The thing you said, uh,

• 23:28Mark Manson?

  you said something earlier, uh, strategic selfishness?

• 23:31Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, cultivated.

• 23:32Mark Manson?

  Cultivated selfish, yeah. So it reminded me of this, have you heard of this concept, strategic incompetence?

• 23:37Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 23:38Mark Manson?

  So I love this. Um, so it's like, all the married guys listening will relate to this. Uh, so I'm a terrible cook and uh,

• 23:49Chris Williamson?

  You look like someone that would be a good cook.

• 23:50Mark Manson?

  No, I'm awful.

• 23:51Chris Williamson?

  You have the hair of a good cook.

• 23:53Mark Manson?

  Well, thank you.

• 23:53Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 23:55Mark Manson?

  I don't know, yes chef, I don't know what that means, but I'll take it.

• 23:58Chris Williamson?

  I know, I could just see one of those white, you know, like high neck things, like another 50 pounds on you, you'd be great. You're too thin now. Fat Mark Manson would have been fine.

• 24:08Mark Manson?

  I know, I know.

• 24:09Chris Williamson?

  Thin Mark Manson's a fucking shit cook.

• 24:10Mark Manson?

  I know, yeah, you're right, you're right, that ship sailed. Um, the, okay, so one of the reasons I am a bad cook is uh, uh, my wife's an amazing cook. And so if I ever start to become competent at cooking, it means that I will have to start doing some of the cooking. And so it is better for me to just continue being bad at cooking so that I don't ever have to take responsibility for that in my house. People in relationships do this all the time. Like you just, you, you, your partner's good at one thing.

• 24:43Chris Williamson?

  I in the clothes incorrectly on purpose, put a lot of creases in it.

• 24:45Mark Manson?

  Exactly, especially, especially men.

• 24:48Chris Williamson?

  Around the house.

• 24:49Mark Manson?

  We're particularly bad about it. But it's like, everybody does it. People do it at work, too. It's like, it's like, oh, can you go fax these 20 papers or whatever? And people are like, oh, I've never used a fax machine before. When it's like, it's easy, you could figure it out. But like, you want to be dumb because it alleviates responsibility.

• 25:08Mark Manson?

  I love this concept because I think people do it in all sorts of different areas of their lives. Right, like, people, people can be strategically incompetent at certain things because they don't want to deal with some of these harsh truths. Like, they don't want to deal with their self-worth issues. So they're like, they remain dumb in their relationships. Like, it actually incentivizes them to continue to like, be ignorant and clueless and the people that they associate with. Right? They, I'll give you another example, like, I, uh, well, you referred to fat, Mark. I was fat for a long time.

• 25:51Chris Williamson?

  Dude, you've got to own it.

• 25:53Mark Manson?

  I do.

• 25:53Chris Williamson?

  You have to own it.

• 25:54Mark Manson?

  Dude, you want to hear the fun, you'll appreciate this. So when I went on Tim Ferriss's show, I like mentioned, I was like, oh, yeah, I, I'm like, I've been on a health journey. I used to have like, a lot of health issues. And he like, of course, he got into this. He's like, well, have you tried this new therapy? And he like, starts explaining like, all these like.

• 26:10Chris Williamson?

  You've got electrodes trapped in your head.

• 26:11Mark Manson?

  Exactly. He's like, if you, if you vibrate the muscle with electrodes and like, and put your foot behind your head and all this stuff. And he like, goes on this whole three minutes spiel. And he's like, he's like, I don't know, does any of that resonate with you? And I was like, dude, I was just fat.

• 26:30Mark Manson?

  I was just like, I was fat as fuck. I just need to stop drinking.

• 26:34Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 26:35Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 26:36Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 26:37Mark Manson?

  Oh, but to to the health journey point.

• 26:42Mark Manson?

  I was really unhealthy for a long time and I was really overweight and really out of shape. And it was even when it was clear that it was a problem.

• 26:52Mark Manson?

  I kind of had, I developed like a weird sort of like pride or identity around it. Because it's like, you know, everybody in this space is is all about optimization. And, you know, you gotta like, get up at 6am and like stare at the fucking sun and and, you know,

• 27:10Mark Manson?

  do 18 sit ups and like, do whatever your like morning routine is. And I just had this pride of like, yeah, I'm not that guy.

• 27:16Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 27:17Mark Manson?

  You know, like, I, I'm, I, I actually relish in the fact that I have no idea what your morning routine should be. And, uh, and the truth is, is that that that was just like, that was a strategic incompetence because I didn't want to deal with my shit.

• 27:35Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 27:35Mark Manson?

  I didn't want to deal with the fact that I

• 27:36Chris Williamson?

  Very interesting.

• 27:37Mark Manson?

  I ate too much and I drank too much.

• 27:39Chris Williamson?

  That's cool. I, uh,

• 27:43Chris Williamson?

  there was a great, um, insight from a guy called Alexander Date Psych, uh, who is ostensibly an evolutionary psychology and, uh, dating researcher, I suppose. But he has some fucking fantastic takes. And he was talking about how people that are black sheeps are still sheeps. Being a black sheep is still being a sheep. It's funny how many people think they are nonconformist when they're really just strict ideological adherence to a niche dogma. It's kind of like a cult member thinking they are nonconformist because their cult is small. They are actually highly conformist, real NPCs, if you will. They're just conforming to a fringe. So being a black sheep is still being a sheep.

• 28:24Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 28:24Chris Williamson?

  Basically, and, uh, it's crazy how many people think I'm not one of those followers of whatever the mainstream thinks. That's for the fucking NPCs sheeple. And you go, yeah, dude, you're even worse. You're being puppeted by the inverse of what those people are doing. Um, so it's similar to the

• 28:42Mark Manson?

  It's like hipsters.

• 28:43Chris Williamson?

  Correct. Yeah, oh, I I need to drive. I I don't need to care about fashion. It's like purposely not caring about fashion is a fucking fashion. Yes, precisely. Just the reverse. You're not even doing it right. You're doing it the opposite. Another one that's similar to that is deliberate deoptimization. So picking the small areas of your life in which you're going to try and optimize.

• 29:04Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 29:04Chris Williamson?

  And letting the rest of them go. And this is sort of the curse of the perennial insecure overachiever. That, well, I need to get my health perfect, but I need to have the right number of credit cards to maximize my flight points. Because I can get a little bit more if I if I sign up for three Amexes at once. It means that Delta gives you the thing and then, but I mean, it's going to take me five days to set everything up. And then there'll be a lot of forms and the forms were wrong. But, you know, once I've done that, so picking, okay, what are the areas that really matter to me? I'm going to optimize in those and the rest of them, just letting them fall away. Because the stress of trying to be perfect will kill you more quickly than the imperfections will.

• 29:40Mark Manson?

  Totally.

• 29:41Chris Williamson?

  And will take up so much fucking time that, I mean, you could literally do, you could spend your entire day biohacking.

• 29:47Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 29:48Chris Williamson?

  In order to extend your life and in the process of trying to extend your life, completely fucking waste your life.

• 29:54Mark Manson?

  Yeah, exactly. I mean, if you live an extra 50 years, but you spend 70 years optimizing spreadsheets to live those 50 years. Like, you're actually net negative.

• 30:04Chris Williamson?

  Correct. You fucked it. All right. Confidence and fear both require believing in something that hasn't happened yet. At a certain point, you have to consider that you're choosing to be afraid.

• 30:16Mark Manson?

  This ties into the layers of stories, right? Like,

• 30:22Mark Manson?

  I mean, a lot, this kind of comes from, I take a lot of, a lot of my influence comes from Buddhism. And just the core precept of Buddhism, other than life is suffering, is just like not knowing. Like, you don't know anything and being like developing a certain level of comfort in that. And being, still being able to function despite it.

• 30:48Mark Manson?

  And again, I think this, this comes back to, to the narrative thing. Like, our, our brain is, is, we're, our brain is a prediction machine. And as its predictions come in forms of stories about what's going to happen. Is it going to be a good thing? Is it going to be a bad thing? Is it going to go well?

• 31:08Mark Manson?

  And it's gonna do it whether you like you can't stop it. That's just what the brain does, but you don't necessarily have to believe it. You can watch those stories come and go. You can train your brain to watch those stories come and go. Right? And without necessarily identifying or attaching to them.

• 31:26Mark Manson?

  And I just think A, most people aren't aware of that. And then B, even if they are aware of it, they like it's easy to lose track of what stories or narratives you're buying into, or the fact that you can even like kind of choose to find more helpful stories to buy into if you want.

• 31:46Mark Manson?

  So yeah, it's, it's, it's just another one of those like

• 31:51Mark Manson?

  George Orwell's got this great quote of like seeing what what's in front of one's nose takes a constant effort. Like it's often much easier to see what's here than what's here. And I love that metaphor just because it's all of this stuff that I write that it's like that's what it is. It's right here, but because it's here, like I don't see it. I'm focusing on you, right? And

• 32:16Mark Manson?

  it's it's constant.

• 32:19Chris Williamson?

  I wonder whether the, at some point you have to admit that you're choosing to be afraid. I wonder whether

• 32:27Chris Williamson?

  part of that is that we're so identified with our thoughts that it's the it's more real to us than reality because reality's final touch point before we actually understand it is our thoughts, right? We filter it through our brains before we then start to tell ourselves the story of whatever that is. And then the story's molested by the filter as well.

• 32:49Chris Williamson?

  So yeah, confidence and fear both require believing in something that hasn't happened yet. Okay, so we have an upward aiming trajectory and a downward aiming trajectory. You could say sort of abundance mindset, scarcity mindset, optimist, pessimist, whatever.

• 33:04Chris Williamson?

  And if you assume that you can choose to be confident, I can choose to believe that this is going to go well. So, okay, are you also choosing to believe that it's going to go badly in that case?

• 33:14Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 33:15Chris Williamson?

  It's like a, it's, you know, the fundamental attribution error. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like a confidence equivalent

• 33:21Mark Manson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 33:21Chris Williamson?

  of the fundamental attribution error. I had this really great insight, you know? Anybody that's been to therapy for a while immediately starts looking at their parents and you start to think, okay, well, fucking why, why, why am I like this? And this thing happened because of that, and that's because of them, and so on and so forth. Much of the time, people are happy to lay their shortcomings, their avoidant attachment and their rampant fucking over-sexualization of themselves and others and their need for external validation, happy to lay all of that at the feet of their upbringing. Very rarely do they lay their strengths at the feet of their upbringing.

• 33:57Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 33:57Chris Williamson?

  You know, it's like, but what about your confidence and your resilience? And what about the fact that you, you know, you work really well in psychology? So no, no, that was because of me. I self-authored. I self-authored my strengths. But my weaknesses were imposed on me.

• 34:09Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 34:09Chris Williamson?

  And it's kind of an internal equivalent of that here when it's, okay, well, why are you choosing fear and not confidence? I mean, there's many ways, right? It's not all fucking you are insufficient and this is your problem and blah, blah. We've got negativity, but fucking rampant negativity bias, but the choice is there.

• 34:24Mark Manson?

  There's, there's also an element of the strategic incompetence here too, right? Like it's, it's, let's say I choose to fear coming on this podcast, right? I'm like, oh my God, I'm going on Modern Wisdom. He's going to bring the big lights.

• 34:38Chris Williamson?

  Don't say it like that.

• 34:39Mark Manson?

  He's going to bring the big lights this time. I'm so nervous. And you know, like that gets me sympathy from people. That gives me, it's a way to like.

• 34:48Chris Williamson?

  Lower expectations.

• 34:49Mark Manson?

  Lower expectations for myself. Maybe it's a way to kind of brag to certain people. You know, maybe after I do the show, I'm like, oh my God, I bombed. This is like going so horribly. And then like, I get to go home and like get more sympathy and validation from people.

• 35:02Chris Williamson?

  And then positive reinforcement went, dude, you went so well.

• 35:05Mark Manson?

  Oh my God, you're amazing.

• 35:06Chris Williamson?

  You have such, you have such high standards for yourself.

• 35:08Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 35:08Chris Williamson?

  Do you know what it is, Mark? Your problem, your problem is like, you're amazing and you don't even see it. Like you're, you just have such high standards for yourself.

• 35:15Mark Manson?

  This is, this is getting good. Yeah. Now, now we're getting to it.

• 35:18Chris Williamson?

  I can't do it in a Latino accent, I'm afraid. Sorry.

• 35:20Mark Manson?

  This is, now we're getting to it. But yeah, you, you know what I'm, you see what I'm saying though? Like it's, it's fear, like there's social value in fear, just in that it like, it generates attention and awareness for yourself. And, um, and I think some people almost get like, uh, sometimes I think like, like people who have anxiety, it's, it's almost like a fear addiction. It's like the, uh, this like compulsive.

• 35:49Mark Manson?

  Validation seeking that happens through always being worried about something.

• 35:53Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 35:55Mark Manson?

  Something's always going wrong. There's always a fire to put out. It's a, it is a consistent way to draw attention to yourself, draw reassurance to yourself, bring validation to yourself. And so I do think it's like people, there are very subtle incentives around people to like, choose the fear narrative.

• 36:16Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 36:17Mark Manson?

  That maybe they aren't aware of.

• 36:18Chris Williamson?

  This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep. If you struggle to stay asleep because your body gets too hot or too cold, this is going to help. It automatically cools down or warms up each side of your bed up to 20 degrees. It's got integrated sensors to track your sleep time, your sleep phases, your H R V, your snoring and your heart rate with 99% accuracy. And it'll even start cooling or heating your bed for you an hour before bedtime, which is why Eight Sleep has been clinically proven to increase total sleep by up to one hour every night. Sleep isn't just about how long you rest, but how well your body stays in its optimal temperature range throughout the night. And Eight Sleep has absolutely perfected this. And when I'm on the road like I am right now, it feels fucking medieval to not be sleeping on a cooled mattress topper. Best of all, they've got a 30 day sleep trial.

• 37:01Chris Williamson?

  So you can buy it and sleep on it for 29 nights. And if you don't like it, they will give you your money back and they ship internationally. Right now, you can get $350 off by going to the link in the description below or heading to eightsleep.com/modernd wisdom and using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout. That's E I G H T sleep.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. I had a great conversation with this guy, Dr. Russell Kennedy's, the anxiety M D. Doctor guy specialized in anxiety. He's equally bottom up as well as top down, which I really love. So he's, okay, what's happening in the nervous system? Can we do some breathwork? Can we get you to fucking meditate and chill out a little bit? And what's the story you're telling yourself? Do you need C B T? Do you need act therapy? Blah, blah, blah. So I wrote this, a little essay that I'm going to read to you. About it after this week.

• 37:44Chris Williamson?

  Um, I've been thinking about impediments to happiness and I can see two obvious roadblocks. First is wanting things to be different. Happiness is the state when nothing is missing. When nothing is missing, your mind shuts down and stops running into the past or future to regret something or to plan something. If you want the world to be different, your happiness is held hostage until that change occurs. Sometimes this is an actual change you need to make to leave an unhappy relationship, change for an unfilling fulfilling career, complete a difficult conversation, and we will often remain in years of misery to avoid a few minutes of pain. The second roadblock, this is the one that's related, is uncertainty. Humans never genuinely pursue happiness. They only pursue relief from uncertainty.

• 38:25Chris Williamson?

  Happiness emerges momentarily as a byproduct whenever uncertainty briefly disappears. If you feel like you can't predict the future, you will default to fear and worry and rumination. Your mindscape will eclipse reality's landscape. Worrying about the thing you can't predict usually involves a nightmare fantasy, which is way worse than what could happen in reality. However, this imagined reality briefly collapses the chaos of the world into certainty. And this is how much humans abhor not knowing how the future will unfold. We would rather imagine a catastrophe than deal with something unpredictable. Sometimes these situations overlap. A family member gets an uncertain medical diagnosis and we can't be with them. We argue with our partner while we're apart and we don't know how they're feeling overnight.

• 39:10Chris Williamson?

  We try to mend a broken friendship with a letter and haven't yet got a reply. So if you're feeling unhappy, look to where you're uncertain and where you want things to be different first. But it's that humans abhor not knowing how the future will unfold so much that we would rather imagine a catastrophe than deal with something unpredictable because it collapses the set of, huh, well, at least I know what it, I mean, it's terrible.

• 39:32Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 39:33Chris Williamson?

  But it's not unknown.

• 39:34Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 39:34Chris Williamson?

  And that's how much we don't like things that are unknown.

• 39:36Mark Manson?

  Which if you zoom out from like an evolutionary point of view, it makes sense, right? Because it's, we're not evolutionary optimized to be happy. We're evolutionary optimized to be predictive and adaptable to our environment.

• 39:48Chris Williamson?

  Effective, right?

• 39:49Mark Manson?

  So.

• 39:51Mark Manson?

  It's happiness is actually just a lever in our brain that our biology is pushing and pulling to get us to do the right things or worry about the right things. It's just our biology is not used to, you know, watching 2000 TikToks a day.

• 40:07Chris Williamson?

  Eventually you'll realize that it's better to be disliked for who you are than liked for who you are not. Then everything will change.

• 40:17Mark Manson?

  Yeah, I

• 40:23Mark Manson?

  being liked for who you're not is not being liked, right? Even if you get people to like the performance that you're putting on,

• 40:32Mark Manson?

  you never get the, you never get the satisfaction of being liked. You'll, because it's not you, it's the performance. And it actually backfires because it just reinforces that you have to perform more.

• 40:46Chris Williamson?

  You're not good enough.

• 40:47Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 40:47Chris Williamson?

  You're not acceptable.

• 40:48Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 40:49Chris Williamson?

  I think this was the fundamental, there was many, but I think that this is one of the fundamental issues with the pick up artists movement. The way that it came about, uh, that what it taught men who were struggling with women was that, hey, you can be really effective with women. You just need to not be yourself. You just need to be.

• 41:09Mark Manson?

  I said, dude, I saw this firsthand so many times, like I, I saw.

• 41:12Chris Williamson?

  People don't know that you wrote models, dude. The best, still the best dating advice book for me, everyone should go and get it on Audible and go back in 2014, that came out.

• 41:21Mark Manson?

  13.

• 41:22Chris Williamson?

  13, fuck 12 years, dude. That's insane. That's if you're a guy who wants to improve, I would say, um, uh, mate, be the guy women want. Jeffrey Miller and Tucker Maxx.

• 41:33Mark Manson?

  Yep.

• 41:33Chris Williamson?

  And models by you, the two, they were the two fucking, the two car garage of.

• 41:38Mark Manson?

  Thanks, Ben.

• 41:39Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 41:39Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 41:41Mark Manson?

  Yeah, I used to coach those guys and it was funny because it's, I saw it all the time, you know, guys, they, they'd learn the lines. They practiced the techniques.

• 41:49Chris Williamson?

  Did you see the midget fight outside?

• 41:50Mark Manson?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. Who lies more?

• 41:54Mark Manson?

  But it, and a lot of them, they would start getting laid and then they, they would get laid. Like you would take these kind of awkward nerds who had never had a girlfriend, never hooked up. They'd learn all these tactics and stuff. They'd start getting laid all the time and they'd actually feel worse about themselves. They'd actually get more depressed. And, and it was exactly this. It's like they're not, the fact that they had to learn a performance to get a woman to like them just reinforced how unlikable they were.

• 42:23Chris Williamson?

  You're not good enough.

• 42:23Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 42:24Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 42:26Chris Williamson?

  I, eventually you'll realize that it's better to be disliked for who you are than liked for who you are not. It took me a 15 minute TEDx talk to say that. I'm not kidding. I did an entire 15 minute TEDx talk. Took fucking months. Took so long. But yeah, I had this, I had this insight doing a club promo that toward the end of my twenties, I'd achieved success in a lot of the ways that society tells a young man that he should be successful. It's similar to, massively dissimilar arc to yourself.

• 42:53Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 42:54Chris Williamson?

  You got notoriety. You have sort of social access, women and like a little bit of money and stuff and you're comfortable and people know who you are and all the rest of it. I was like, fuck, like, why does none of this success really like feel real? And I realized that a persona can't receive love. It can only receive praise. You know, it's, it's saying, hey, well done Gladiator, not well done Russell Crowe. Well done Thor, not well done Chris Hemsworth. There's this sense that, you know, if you're not being who you truly are, all of your successes will feel hollow because people aren't in love with you. They're just applauding the role that you play.

• 43:33Chris Williamson?

  And you're always at best, the closest that you get is being one degree removed from your successes. And much of the time you're four, five, six, seven degrees removed from it because it's okay. I, Chris, must work out what him, Mark, wants me to say. When he said, hey, what do you think about the new Avengers movie? It's a, a reverse engineer. What do I know about what Mark likes about the Avengers movies? I think it's franchise and what do I think that he's predicted? I think it's gooood. Yeah, it is good. Yes, it is good. I knew it was good, you know? And there's always this performance that you have on, which again, just reinforces, you cannot be you, which is, it's also exhausting. It's, it's like such a draining mental exercise. This way, I, I hate, I hate networking.

• 44:17Chris Williamson?

  I'm like, I'm a terrible networker. And, and I think part of it is I feel like I have to do that a little bit. Like, I don't naturally.

• 44:25Mark Manson?

  See, this is why I don't have guests on my podcast anymore. Cause I'm not like.

• 44:28Chris Williamson?

  Keeping on top of them.

• 44:29Mark Manson?

  I don't really care. Like, I'm not, I'm not super curious about like, oh, I wonder what that guy across the room is like. Like, that's just not me. I'm like, very low key, introverted.

• 44:41Mark Manson?

  Don't need to like be everybody's friend. And I, I still feel that sometimes in professional contexts where it's like, okay, I'm in a room. I'm like, this is totally one of those rooms where I should be walking around like shaking everybody's hand, introducing myself. And I'm just like, uh, and it's exhausting. It's like so fucking exhausting. So yeah, I can't imagine living like that. Like, it's okay when it's just like this one sliver of my life that I only occupy briefly, you know? Each year, but.

• 45:08Chris Williamson?

  To never switch it off when you get home.

• 45:09Mark Manson?

  If you're going through your whole life that way, and especially, yeah, if you're that way with your partner. If you're that way with your, your friends. It's just. It seems like such a miserable way to live.

• 45:21Chris Williamson?

  It's the reason for, how would you say? Front loading being yourself in the extreme as early in a relationship as you think that person can tolerate. Uh, that's very carefully chosen words.

• 45:37Chris Williamson?

  I had, look, I did, I, I was, uh, single last year for the first time in a long time. And certainly for the first time being this version of me.

• 45:44Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 45:44Chris Williamson?

  And, um, I had a, I had a strategy of an intellectual shit test.

• 45:51Mark Manson?

  Okay.

• 45:52Chris Williamson?

  Which is kind of like.

• 45:53Mark Manson?

  You told them your business idea?

• 45:56Chris Williamson?

  Yes. I knew that you'd keep it in your mind. Everyone's gonna be like, what's his billion dollar idea? Like, you don't get to find out. It's, if you imagine, uh, nagging, but instead of insulting a girl, uh, sending them Psychology Today articles. And seeing if they say something interesting in response.

• 46:14Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 46:14Chris Williamson?

  Uh, and it was like, this is something that's interesting to me. Human nature is one of the, like, if you're gonna get into a relationship with me.

• 46:20Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 46:21Chris Williamson?

  I'm gonna send you lots of articles from Substack, okay? And I'm gonna expect at some point over the next week for us to have a chat about one of the things that I've sent you. That's hopefully remotely interesting to you. And if that doesn't, it's a relatively innocuous, but pretty good. Front end filter for.

• 46:41Chris Williamson?

  Maybe I'm not going to be reading articles at the same velocity that I am now in 10 years' time, but I imagine I'm still going to be intellectually curious. And this is a good rough-hewn rubric and like a cute, oh, isn't this interesting? You see that article about how Taylor Swift's changed, whatever the fuck? Like, that's interesting. So I'm like, okay, I'm gonna do that. And it, I think an older version of me, or a younger version of me,

• 47:02Mark Manson?

  Sure.

• 47:02Chris Williamson?

  would have been, huh, well, that's not, that doesn't necessarily fit what a cool guy would do. Like, are you really gonna send this article about like the mating habits of zebras? And how it's different to horses? And the fact that that's like really interesting because of the different environment they grew up in? Some bullshit? It's like, oh, yeah, actually, that's actually a really, really good thing to do. And the story that it reinforces in yourself is, I am allowed to be me.

• 47:30Mark Manson?

  Who you are.

• 47:31Chris Williamson?

  I'm allowed to be more me.

• 47:32Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 47:32Chris Williamson?

  Sometimes than I even, especially if you can tune it up at the start and push yourself beyond your comfort zone. Cause you go, huh, I'm future-proofed for like, I wouldn't have usually done this for two years.

• 47:42Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 47:42Chris Williamson?

  And, you know, I've got myself to...

• 47:44Mark Manson?

  It's funny, it's funny you brought up models, cause like I'm remembering now, you know, one of the central points in that book, which at the time was controversial, was that as a man, you shouldn't, you're not optimizing to get laid as many times as possible. You're optimizing to be happy with women. Like, that's the whole point of this. Like, whether you get laid, whether you, you, you date and sleep with one woman or a hundred, what matters is your happiness. It's not like...

• 48:13Chris Williamson?

  You can get to that.

• 48:14Mark Manson?

  It's not the body count, right? And like what you just described is, I, I'm just having flashbacks of when I was in that industry. Like, I would say things like that. I'm like, yeah, dude, send them zebra articles, you know, like, cause then that's gonna show you if she's the type of girl that you're gonna enjoy being with. And, you know, guys would be like, well, good luck getting laid with zebra articles, you know? And they'd look down on it. They'd call you fucking beta and pussy.

• 48:38Chris Williamson?

  Hang on, so you're, you're prepared to sacrifice something that you know that you do want for something that you think that you do want?

• 48:44Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 48:45Chris Williamson?

  With someone who doesn't actually want you because you can't be you in order to get the thing that you think that you want?

• 48:50Mark Manson?

  I don't, I didn't follow all that, but yeah, sure.

• 48:52Chris Williamson?

  Sick. All right.

• 48:56Mark Manson?

  Wait, wait. Okay, go ahead.

• 48:57Chris Williamson?

  No, you go ahead.

• 48:58Mark Manson?

  No, I was, I had, I was gonna tell a story.

• 49:00Chris Williamson?

  Tell a story.

• 49:02Mark Manson?

  So the night I met my wife, I met her at three in the morning in a nightclub in Brazil. And within five minutes, I somehow ended up in a conversation about Russian grammar and how it was different from Romance language grammar. And she actually sat there and listened the whole time, dude. And she was like asking questions. She was like curious about it. And I remember, I remember that moment. I was like, holy shit, she's still here.

• 49:36Mark Manson?

  And I was like, wow, we're gonna get along really well.

• 49:39Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 49:39Mark Manson?

  And, but yeah, it's funny. It's like one of the first conversations she and I had.

• 49:45Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of guys want to date a Brazilian. I'm not convinced that they would have zeroed in on Russian grammar and Romance languages the way into their heart. But like, I mean, you were the guy that wrote the book, so.

• 49:59Mark Manson?

  Whatever works, right?

• 50:00Chris Williamson?

  Before we continue, you've probably heard me talk about Element before. And that's because I'm frankly dependent on it. For the last three years, I've started every morning with Element. Element contains a science-backed electrolyte ratio of sodium, potassium, and magnesium with no sugar, no gluten, or artificial ingredients, or any other BS. It plays a huge role in reducing muscle cramps and fatigue while optimizing brain health, regulating appetite, and curbing cravings. That's why it's used by everyone from Dr. Andrew Huberman to Dr. Mike Isritel, Olympic athletes, and FBI sniper teams, and me. This orange flavor in a cold glass of water tastes like a beautiful salty, sweet, orangey nectar, and there's a no questions asked refund policy. And you don't even need to return the box if you don't like it.

• 50:44Chris Williamson?

  That's how confident they are that you'll love it. Plus, they offer free shipping in the US. And you can get a free sample pack of all eight flavors with your first purchase by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinklmnt.com/ModernWisdom. That's drinklmnt.com/ModernWisdom. Sorry to break it to you, but it's impossible for someone who destroys your mental health to be the love of your life. Obsessing over someone isn't love. It's fear disguised as affection. Unhealthy love often feels exciting, dramatic, and profound, but hurts us in the long run. Healthy love often feels dull, peaceful, and repetitive, but it heals us in the long run.

• 51:22Mark Manson?

  Yeah, I think fundamentally, people mistake intensity of emotion for positivity of emotion.

• 51:34Mark Manson?

  They ride the roller coaster of a dramatic and toxic relationship and they the highs are so high and the lows are so low and they they just think that well, this is part of it. Right. Because it's they're experiencing both extremes. It's like by far the most emotional experience they've ever had around anything in their life. And so they they assume, oh, okay, well, this must be what it is. But it's not that it's actually you there shouldn't be this like insane oscillation between the highs and lows.

• 52:06Mark Manson?

  There, of course, are highs and lows with every relationship like that's natural, but

• 52:11Mark Manson?

  Not daily. It's what you want, what you want to optimize is like, you know, the average baseline, right, that you return to.

• 52:22Mark Manson?

  So, yeah, I just I see that all the time. People, people, people mistake the intensity of the emotion for

• 52:30Mark Manson?

  or the intensity of the relationship for being a positive relationship. And I think part of this happens because just like the way our psychology is, is that the more intense the emotion, the stronger the story and narrative and and meaning that we like place on that experience. When, if you think about it, like there are all sorts of emotionally intense experiences you can have that actually don't mean anything at all. Right. Like, I can jump out of a plane. That's gonna be a very emotionally intense experience. It doesn't necessarily mean anything.

• 53:03Mark Manson?

  I can date a woman who drives me absolutely fucking insane and then have the best makeup sex of my life. And just like the airplane, convince myself that it means something, but it actually doesn't really mean anything like what.

• 53:18Mark Manson?

  It took me way too long to figure out that like what actually means something is the quality of time spent together in the dull moments. Like,

• 53:29Mark Manson?

  what's the, what's the, the delta

• 53:33Mark Manson?

  between your baseline and your happiness? Like, what is your level of happiness during the dull moments? When like, nothing's happening, when you're just sitting around eating breakfast, you know, reading emails. Are you happy in that moment? Like, that's what you should be measuring.

• 53:50Chris Williamson?

  Because that's what life's made up of.

• 53:51Mark Manson?

  That's the vast majority of life.

• 53:53Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Life is made up of breakfast at the kitchen counter.

• 53:55Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 53:56Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 53:56Mark Manson?

  Checking emails.

• 54:00Chris Williamson?

  It's interesting to think about, okay, there's emotionally intense situations that don't mean anything. And I imagine that there's also emotionally mundane situations that mean a lot.

• 54:11Mark Manson?

  That mean everything.

• 54:12Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. So the level of peace in your mind as your head hits the pillow at night. Never going to probably appear in a gratitude, even going to appear in a gratitude journal because it's just such, it's so obvious. Again, it's there.

• 54:23Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 54:24Chris Williamson?

  It's like, I slept okay.

• 54:25Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 54:25Chris Williamson?

  You know, because I, I wasn't worrying about something. It's like, huh. Well, fucking, there's a lot of people on the planet that wish that they could have that.

• 54:33Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 54:33Chris Williamson?

  There we are. So peace, optimizing for peace. You know, not sexy. What about obsessing over someone isn't love, it's fear disguised as affection?

• 54:42Mark Manson?

  Yeah, because obsession is, is, is driven by a fear of loss. You know, you're, when you're obsessing over somebody or

• 54:51Mark Manson?

  ruminating over somebody, you're not,

• 54:55Mark Manson?

  you're not actually loving that person. You're trying to prevent loss of that person. And those are two very different things.

• 55:03Mark Manson?

  Love is very, loving is, it's unconditional. It's done. Like, I don't do things for my wife to like, prevent her from leaving me. That's not the intention. You know, it's like, I don't buy her flowers because I'm like, well, I better do this, otherwise she might leave me. Like, that's, that's not love. Love is you do something for her expecting nothing in return, just for the simple reason that you want them to be happy. And

• 55:33Mark Manson?

  Again, I think it's another, it's another area that people like mistake because they feel such an intensity and because they feel such an intensity of the emotion and that emotion is directed towards a person and keeping that person as close to them as possible. They assume, well, this is, this must be what love is, right? This is, clearly I'm in love with this person because all day and night, all I think about is like, how do I keep them as close to me as possible? And that's not love, that's fear.

• 56:02Chris Williamson?

  There's a good insight from Visakhkanth Verasmi. He says, I think he calls it the divorce paradox, which is, why do people who from the outside seemingly have a perfect relationship, why do they end up breaking up? And it's because as a society, we haven't fully internalized the lesson that it is not the highs, but the lows and how you manage them that make or break relationships. And outwardly, it's rare that you see two people arguing. They'll put the face on, they're having a good time at the wedding or at the dinner or whatever it might be. But then when they go home, they're fucking shouting and screaming and calling each other names and sleeping in separate rooms. Well, you don't see that. And how well do they deal with

• 56:44Chris Williamson?

  those bad times? So it's how you deal with bad times that are a better predictor than very few, I would guess, most marriages fail because of a surplus of poor rupture and repair as opposed to a scarcity of super intense, high experiences. You're insufficiently exciting to me is maybe there, but less than you are too low to me. You are too much of a drag.

• 57:12Mark Manson?

  Absolutely. And one thing I've told, I tell friends all the time, which is a really annoying thing to tell a friend in like a new relationship. But like, whenever I talk to people who are in a new relationship and they're like, you know, honeymoon period, really falling for the person, I always tell them, I'm like, that all sounds great.

• 57:31Mark Manson?

  But let me know when you've had your first fight. Like, you really don't know what it's made of until you've had your first real fight about something. Because all the good stuff, I don't want to say it's easy to find. It, but it is relatively, it's not scarce. Like, you can find somebody who you have a lot of fun with.

• 57:50Chris Williamson?

  You enjoy being happy? Hey, me too.

• 57:52Mark Manson?

  Yeah, it's like, oh, you like the, the thing? I like the thing too. Let's do the thing together. Like, that's, that's not that complicated. What's complicated is when all of her childhood issues come up and get triggered because of the thing that you said, because you've got this blind spot in your life that you haven't dealt with. And then you start really going at it. And it's really the, the quality, like you said, the rupture and repair, the quality of the fighting. Like, how, all commu-, like, communication always breaks down to a certain extent during fights. But it's like, how deeply does it break down? Does it get nasty? Does it get personal? And then similarly, how quickly do you recover from it? And do you, do you recover from it? Or do you hold it against each other?

• 58:37Mark Manson?

  Do you start the scoreboard? You know, it's like, okay, it's one, zero, right? If the scoreboard's there, you, it's over. It's just a matter of time.

• 58:46Chris Williamson?

  I don't care how smart or beautiful they are, how many companies they started or degrees they have. They're insecure. They have no fucking clue what they're doing either. Feeling like you have no idea what you're doing is the price of entry to achieving your dream.

• 59:00Mark Manson?

  I feel, I feel like this just undermines your entire podcast.

• 59:05Chris Williamson?

  I have never claimed to have any idea about what it is that I'm doing. My guests may have done.

• 59:11Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 59:12Chris Williamson?

  You included.

• 59:15Mark Manson?

  No, no, but yeah. I mean, I, I think it's, it's a, a, so my, my, a good friend of mine had a really funny story around this. So a really good friend of mine back in New York, startup guy, super smart.

• 59:31Mark Manson?

  Startup founder, had an exit, did really well, went to work for a VC, did really well at the VC, and then eventually got brought in by like one of the 20 or 30 biggest companies in the world to advise and help. Man, like they're doing like an internal incubator.

• 59:50Mark Manson?

  And basically, they wanted him to come in and kind of like advise their, their projects or whatever. So, you know, and this guy's like 30, right? So he's like climbed the mountain, climbed the next mountain, and now he's like being brought into like one of the biggest companies in the world, literally household name, and he's supposed to be in charge of like all these like special projects and new innovations and stuff. And I remember he came back, I like had dinner with him when he got back to town, and I was like, dude, how was it? And he just looked at me and he's like, he's like, I just had this realization of like, it's fucking idiots all the way down. Like, I, I always thought one day I'm gonna walk in a room and there's, it's like, okay, these are the people that know what's going on. These are the people who like have the plan and

• 1:00:35Mark Manson?

  have figured it out, and these are the lords of the universe, and they're like secretly like pulling the puppet strings behind the scenes, and, and the rest of us are just trying to keep up. And he was like, yeah, nobody knows what the fuck they're doing. Like, it's, he's like, it's a disaster. It's a complete and utter disaster. And he's like, I don't know what I'm gonna do, but they're paying me a ton, a ton of money. So, um, I always loved that story, and I love that phrase, it's idiots all the way down. And I include us in that. Like, I, I, I think it's, it's we're all just like chipping away at our own idiocy, slowly but surely.

• 1:01:14Chris Williamson?

  Publicly, but that I do think that there is a, there's a fair trade to be made, and certainly one that I've made even more perhaps than you as somebody who's actually written legitimate books. You can trade expertise for relatability. And I think if you say, hey, I don't know what's going on, and in my not knowing of what's going on, you can feel better in your not knowing of what's going on. You know, that is probably one of the most common threads across 950 episodes or whatever we've done at this show, which is, I'm unsure about this thing, but I'm gonna try and find out from someone who might know a tiny little bit more than me.

• 1:01:53Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:54Chris Williamson?

  And we're gonna work it out together of. Well, six months later, I finally arrive at a realization that something approximating like accuracy. Ha, well, that's cool. Well, we'll hold on to that one thing and we'll get another one and get another one. George Mack, one of my favorite, favorite friends and favorite writers, he's got this essay, Adults Don't Exist. Steve Jobs delayed nine months of medical treatment of pancreatic cancer to try a carrot juice diet and acupuncture. Mozart overspent his income, lived miserably in mountains of debt and regularly wrote letters to friends begging for money. Friedrich Nietzsche lost his virginity in a brothel and caught syphilis. He only saw his work sell 300 copies in his lifetime.

• 1:02:34Chris Williamson?

  Martin Luther King had extramarital affairs with over 40 different women, including spending his last night alive with two women and physically attacking another. Isaac Newton spent 30 years of his life writing 1 million words on the pseudoscience of alchemy, hidden for years by his heirs because they were too embarrassed to publish it. Don't put any adult on a pedestal, kill your gurus, or a more useful belief, the adults aren't going to save you, they don't even exist.

• 1:03:01Mark Manson?

  I love that. That's awesome.

• 1:03:02Chris Williamson?

  He realized when his friends that he went to university with, who were the most degenerates, Larry, they couldn't hold, they couldn't get up on time, they weren't handing their assignments in, went to go and be teachers. But holy fuck. That means, oh, that means that my teachers were that idiot from. Oh, okay. Like the adults literally do not exist. It's idiots all the way down.

• 1:03:34Mark Manson?

  I do want to hit on this, though. So one, one of the things that has been like concerning me lately, so I agree with you, by the way. I think one of the things that is good about what you do, what I do, with the kind of like all the alternative media or whatever you want to call it, is that there is a little bit more of an openness of uncertainty.

• 1:03:58Chris Williamson?

  I don't have it all figured out.

• 1:03:59Mark Manson?

  Yeah, lack of expertise, whatever.

• 1:04:03Mark Manson?

  Yet the end result seems to be producing a public of.

• 1:04:08Mark Manson?

  Greater uninformed certainty, right? So we've gone from a media and information environment that was very much built on certainty and expertise and credentials and authority and all that shit. And now we've gone to a much more decentralized information ecosystem and media system, where people are very open about like, well, I don't have all the answers, but like, let's try to figure this out.

• 1:04:34Mark Manson?

  And yet, the public just seems like more certain about dumb shit than ever.

• 1:04:38Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. That's interesting. There's a great idea called knowingness.

• 1:04:44Chris Williamson?

  Lots of the issues of the modern world are laid at the feet of misinformation. And the claim is basically this person believes the wrong things because they've consumed the wrong stuff. And if only we could get them to consume the right stuff.

• 1:04:56Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:57Chris Williamson?

  We could update their beliefs. You go, well, I mean, that's a pretty fair assessment if that's the problem. But if the problem is knowingness, knowingness being a lack of curiosity around what is true in place of a dogmatic belief about what you already know. So it's believing that you know the answer to the question before the question's already been asked. That is a prophylactic against any new information, regardless of whether it's miss or dis or mal or correct or whatever.

• 1:05:25Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 1:05:25Chris Williamson?

  And the challenge that you have is to try and get, I guess, the reason or the way that you know that this is true is precisely what you're pointing at, which is everybody acts as if the fact have already been settled, while no one can agree on what the facts are. Like, we say, people say, well, we know how much humans are contributing to climate change. We know this for a fact on both sides.

• 1:05:53Mark Manson?

  Sure.

• 1:05:54Chris Williamson?

  While both sides don't agree with each other.

• 1:05:55Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 1:05:56Chris Williamson?

  And it's the same as kind of a religion question, which is every religion acts as if theirs is correct whilst not agreeing with all of the others. It's like, well, this can't all be correct. Like, none of these, like, it can't, everybody can't be right here.

• 1:06:08Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:08Chris Williamson?

  At best, one of you can be right.

• 1:06:10Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 1:06:10Chris Williamson?

  And the same thing goes with the sort of knowing this question.

• 1:06:13Mark Manson?

  Yeah. Yeah, I guess it's, and it's, the more, the greater diversity of information that people are exposed to, the more contradictions arise, and the more the contradictions arise, the more people just kind of default to their. Whatever feels.

• 1:06:28Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 1:06:28Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 1:06:29Chris Williamson?

  Well, I just so yeah, confident or yeah, uninformed certainty is certainly part of it. But I also see the black sheep equivalent of that, which is sort of like nihilistic despondency. Like, well, you know, we can't trust anything anymore.

• 1:06:46Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:46Chris Williamson?

  Who even knows what facts are? Uh, and that you can't trust the news and you can't trust, you can't even trust your neighbor next door on what they're saying. And I wonder whether that is, there's maybe a bunch of different reactions to an overwhelm of information.

• 1:07:01Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:02Chris Williamson?

  One of them being you kind of intellectually reverse engineer the biases you wanted to be true all along.

• 1:07:10Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:11Chris Williamson?

  But on another side, you just throw your hands up and say, I don't even like, I can't even trust anything anymore.

• 1:07:16Mark Manson?

  Right. Yeah, there's definitely an asymmetry around trust. Warren Buffett's got that great quote where he says it, it takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to, to ruin it. And, and I think the same is true with trust. It's like, an institution can spend decades building up a certain amount of reliability and then just ruin it in a single day. And I think the more we're exposed to everything, um, the more we're exposed to like the flaws and everything.

• 1:07:44Chris Williamson?

  This episode is brought to you by Nomatic. Summer is here and travel season is in full swing, but let's be honest, your backpack was probably built for a school field trip, not international adventures, which is where Nomatic comes in. I've been able to travel the world with this bag right here because it's designed by people who actually understand the chaos of being on the move. Everything has its place and no space goes unused. It's compact enough to fit under the seat, but somehow fits everything that you need when you're on the go. And if you're still on the fence, that product will last you literally a lifetime, the lifetime guarantee. So this is the final backpack that you'll ever need to buy. And you can return or exchange any product within 30 days for any reason. So you can buy your new bag, put your possessions in it for a full month. And if you don't like it, they'll just give you your money back and they ship internationally.

• 1:08:28Chris Williamson?

  Right now you can get a 20% discount and see everything that I use and recommend by going to the link in the description below or heading to nomatic.com slash modern wisdom. That's nomatic.com slash modern wisdom. Related to that on the.

• 1:08:44Chris Williamson?

  Independent media system thing and also the trade between expertise and relatability. I have a theory that we don't admire people who appear perfect. We admire the people who are imperfect and are comfortable with it. And Dr. Robert Glover, who wrote No More Mr. Nice Guy, he's got the three essences of a masculine man, which usually would be the sort of thing that makes my fucking toes curl, but this one's actually really good. And he says, a man who's comfortable in his own skin, who knows where he's going and is having fun while he's going there. And you go, okay, well, the comfortable in your own skin thing, okay, someone who is imperfect and comfortable with it. Right? It's very difficult to be comfortable in your own skin. No one believes that, very few people believe that they're perfect.

• 1:09:26Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 1:09:27Chris Williamson?

  So given that you probably are imperfect and know it, but are comfortable with it, you think, huh? This person's relatable and reliable.

• 1:09:34Mark Manson?

  Right. It's another paradoxical kind of relationship dynamic in that we actually admire people who are comfortable with their own flaws. Like, we don't, like, think about the, if you think about a person who's like just trying to cover for their own flaws and act like they're not there or pretend like it's not their fault. Generally, like, we don't like those people. Those people are very annoying. And if you think about the people you do find very endearing, it's the people who are quirky, weird, you know, kind of off sometimes.

• 1:10:06Chris Williamson?

  Why do you think that is?

• 1:10:07Mark Manson?

  But they own it.

• 1:10:11Mark Manson?

  I actually think it comes back to the trust thing. I think it's like, if I see somebody who's a little bit weird, but like owns it, I was like, yeah, I just got this. I'm just kind of an oddball. Like, I feel that I can trust them. That they're not going to bullshit me or try to be something they're not. Whereas somebody who's just trying to look perfect all the time,

• 1:10:33Mark Manson?

  you actually don't trust them. It's like a yes man, right? Like, you know, it's, the irony of a yes man is that somebody who always agrees with you on everything is like the last person you can actually go to for advice.

• 1:10:43Chris Williamson?

  If I can't trust you, no, I can't trust you, yes.

• 1:10:45Mark Manson?

  Exactly. So, I, yeah, I do think the.

• 1:10:50Mark Manson?

  The flaw, like the confidence that comes with one's own flaws and imperfections. Like it ultimately does boil down to a trusting, which is ultimately like why authenticity is sexy. Is because you feel like you can trust the person.

• 1:11:03Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I mean, there's an idea again from George. He's so fucking good. He just did this high agency essay. Everyone should go and see a highagency.com. His essay is available on that. It's fucking sick. But this one, uh, non-fungible tokens, NFTs, there was a big boom, whatever, 2021. And everyone had COVID money and didn't know what to do with it. Uh, he's got this idea of non-fungible people. And that's basically the same as what you're talking about here. He uses his mom as an example and his mom fucking hates fighting. Like can't bear physical altercations. And apparently she was on the phone with George's brother, I think 20 or something. He's some young guy and the, she's driving in the car on her own.

• 1:11:45Chris Williamson?

  And she sees two young boys fighting by the side of the road. So she stops the car in the middle of the street and gets out and sort of fucking, uh, Arthur Shelby's or Tommy Shelby's. And she's like, no fucking fighting, no fucking fight. Like she's got these two apart, but the son is still on the phone. Mum, mum, what? And she's like, it's two people fighting. I must get out and I must stop. It's like middle of the street, got out, like two people she doesn't know, like totally didn't need to get, could have got punished, could have like anything. Gets back in the car, tells the son and George made this point that at her funeral, nobody's going to talk about how she was always on time. Or, you know, the quality of the pasta al dante that she cooked or whatever. But she was the sort of woman that stopped a car in the middle of the street to stop people from fighting.

• 1:12:30Chris Williamson?

  And, uh, it's just a beautiful, that's a non-fungible person.

• 1:12:34Mark Manson?

  It's interesting to think about, like, what are the stories that are gonna, that? It's interesting to think, what are the stories that are gonna be told at your funeral? Because yeah, it's never, I mean, obviously there's stories of like you being very charitable or loving or whatever. But like, people always find quirky shit like that. Like they find the, the NFT version of whoever you were.

• 1:12:54Chris Williamson?

  In what areas were you non-fungible?

• 1:12:56Mark Manson?

  Yeah, like, yeah, well, yeah, where were you in Audible? What's the inside joke that everybody at the funeral service is gonna laugh and understand?

• 1:13:02Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, dude, you remember when he, dot, dot, dot, oh, he did that to you too?

• 1:13:06Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:06Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I know, I know. Didn't we love him? Like, he was so great.

• 1:13:10Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:12Chris Williamson?

  If you aren't naturally tired at night and excited in the morning, then you probably haven't found something meaningful to work on. You are not stressed from doing too much. You are stressed from doing too little of what you care about.

• 1:13:25Mark Manson?

  So this is a drum that I bang on endlessly to the productivity crowd. And I feel like it just gets ignored. But I think emotion is the most important productivity system.

• 1:13:43Mark Manson?

  There's a lot of, and I think the reason it gets discounted is because there is a lot of cheesy, cliched advice around like, oh, if you do what you love, you never work a day of your life, you know, like bullshit like that. It's, passion is practical. Like when you deeply care about something you're doing, you're going to work on it longer. You're going to think harder about the problems. You're going to take feedback better. You're going to be more resilient.

• 1:14:09Mark Manson?

  You're going to be willing to stay up at night, get up early on a Saturday or whatever. Like emotion is, it is actually the highest leverage system within yourself towards whatever your productivity goals are. And I just feel like so much productivity advice is disembodied. It's like, you know, the hustle culture bullshit of just like

• 1:14:34Chris Williamson?

  Ignore how you feel.

• 1:14:35Mark Manson?

  Just grind, grind, grind. And yeah, it's like, oh, you know, stop being a bitch. Like, you know, sleep when you're dead, date when you're dead, like whatever. Go make a billion dollars. It's, what is it for? Like, if it's not for something, like if you're not doing all this work for some greater cause, then what the fuck are you doing? Like, you might as well just hang out at the beach and play video games. Like, because why not? You know, like there's a certain, there's a nihilism in the productivity space right now that like, it really bothers me. And it

• 1:15:15Mark Manson?

  Because A, I don't think it's healthy, but B, I also think it's like just bad advice. Like, the best advice is find something you really fucking love and care about and give yourself to it.

• 1:15:29Mark Manson?

  Bukowski's got this great line. He says, "Find what you love and let it kill you." And I just, there's like so much beauty in that because when you find a craft or a trade or a skill that like you deeply, deeply care about, or a mission that you deeply, deeply care about,

• 1:15:49Mark Manson?

  you are willing, you become willing to trade yourself for that mission and

• 1:15:56Mark Manson?

  and you are like, when you trade your time, you are literally trading your life for something. So what are you going to trade it for? And what is the point of trade, of making that trade?

• 1:16:10Mark Manson?

  Get a billion dollars, you know, get, get a hundred million followers, like, what these, what these fucking do? Like, what does that mean? You know? So I continue to bang that drum.

• 1:16:23Chris Williamson?

  Hopelessly.

• 1:16:24Mark Manson?

  Hopelessly, yes. But I don't, I don't get it. I don't get invited to the, to, you know, the same biohacking conferences that my contemporaries do, so.

• 1:16:36Chris Williamson?

  Joe Hudson's got this wonderful line. He says, "Enjoyment is efficiency."

• 1:16:40Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 1:16:41Chris Williamson?

  That he looks at however much enjoyment I got out of doing a thing is just a direct correlate with how efficient I was at doing it. That the more that I enjoy something, the more efficient I'm going to be.

• 1:16:51Mark Manson?

  Dude, people, and it's double sided as well, right? Like, the better you get at something, the more you fall in love with it. And the more you love something, the more patience you're going to have to get good at it. And so it's just like, to me, it's like the most obvious entry point. But I think a lot of people develop kind of like fucked up relationships with productivity and work.

• 1:17:14Mark Manson?

  And I say this as like a bona fide workaholic.

• 1:17:17Chris Williamson?

  Well, I was gonna say, you know, you have found something that you love and you have done it so much that it kill, almost killed your passion, or at least acutely killed your passion. You wrote, Three books in three years?

• 1:17:31Mark Manson?

  Three, yeah, three books, three books in a movie in four years, yeah.

• 1:17:34Chris Williamson?

  Yep, um, and then needed to kind of just play PlayStation for basically a full year after that to recover.

• 1:17:40Mark Manson?

  Yeah, but it's, it's interesting because in hindsight, I think the reason that happened is I actually lost sight of what, what I was doing and why I was doing it, right? So, early in my career, uh, was blogging, doing the creator thing in the early 2010s, fucking loved it. Book blows up, all these opportunities show up, big book deals, movie deal, you know, world tour, all this shit. Start saying yes to everything because it's like, well, when's this going to come around again? And, and basically gave three to four years of my life to a bunch of stuff that was really, wasn't, it wasn't optimizing for, for what I cared about.

• 1:18:23Mark Manson?

  It wasn't optimizing for, for the mission that had driven me throughout most of my career. It was optimized for, fuck, that's a lot of zeros on that contract, like, I should probably say,

• 1:18:33Chris Williamson?

  Run it back.

• 1:18:34Mark Manson?

  I should probably say yes to that, you know? And, and don't get me wrong, like, it, it's, I think it's okay to do that in, in bits and spurts. But it's not long-term sustainable. And I think a lot of people develop, and, and it took me a number of years to kind of get back to what I love and appreciate about my work and like getting that, that mission focus again.

• 1:19:01Mark Manson?

  But I, I do think people often use productivity as like, they develop like a toxic relationship with productivity. It becomes a, a way to outsource their self-worth.

• 1:19:13Chris Williamson?

  Oh.

• 1:19:13Mark Manson?

  And, and avoid dealing with a lot of these like simple truths that they don't want to admit about themselves.

• 1:19:20Mark Manson?

  And it's,

• 1:19:23Mark Manson?

  And you can definitely get, we live in a culture that will gladly encourage that.

• 1:19:28Chris Williamson?

  Correct. Yeah. I mean, I've always thought about Billy McFarland, the guy that started Fire Festival.

• 1:19:33Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:34Chris Williamson?

  It's the fucking prototypical example of this. I always thought about if Billy McFarland had managed to string together a semi coherent festival, he would have been hailed as the Steve Jobs of marketing.

• 1:19:46Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:47Chris Williamson?

  The, nothing could have changed or nothing would have needed to have changed in his motivation for doing it. His like shameless requirement for self promotion, the deception that he was going through with his investors, the fact that he didn't know that he was the adult that didn't exist, but saying that he did, all the way down. The only issue that people had was that the rug got pulled out from underneath his obfuscation and his lies and his incompetence. But if he'd even just about managed to creep like a okay festival out,

• 1:20:19Chris Williamson?

  people are so seduced by success. The modern world prays at the altar of success so much that they would have happily forgiven or overlooked the things. We all know this. There's so many people that hold on to popularity, not because people think that they're good or authentic or sort of genuinely being truthful, but because they're a rocket ship that's going up and to the right. And that sense of huh, I don't think that that's where your productivity like pioneer should be at. I don't think that that's necessarily the person that you should be following.

• 1:20:57Mark Manson?

  Yeah. Yeah, I agree. Um, it's funny too, because I see so much of this, this stuff and like so much productivity advice. It's funny. To me, so much productivity advice is actually catered to people who are using their productivity as a way to escape their problems, right? It's all about morning protocols and when to set your alarm and hey, do this thing in the first five minutes or whatever. And like, I don't know, I look at that, I'm like, okay, first of all, I'm up by six without an alarm and I can't fucking wait to get to my computer. Like I'm like, I don't have a routine. I'm like already awake. I'm awake because I'm excited.

• 1:21:40Mark Manson?

  Like as soon as my eyes open up, I'm like starting to think about what I'm going to do that day. And I'm so excited that I just like, I get out of bed and I'm in front of my computer within three minutes and like. Why would I use a protocol? Like, why would I need like a habit tracker? Or like, you know, all this stuff? Like, if the emotions are aligned, like, everything takes care of itself. Whereas if the emotions aren't aligned, then you have to spend all this extra energy. It's like the performative thing, right? With people in relationships? It's like if the emotions aren't aligned, then you're like, basically self-flagellating to get yourself to perform all these actions that are ultimately performative. It's like, okay, I put in 12 hours today. I got these six things done. I hit these KPIs this month.

• 1:22:23Mark Manson?

  You know, my new nighttime routine demands I do these six things. And it's like,

• 1:22:29Mark Manson?

  you know, there's a, there's a certain healthy rhythm that like naturally emerges as with most things, most things when, you know, the systems are aligned.

• 1:22:38Chris Williamson?

  That was a, an interesting transition that I had. You know, we, we had, when did we have dinner? It was about a year ago when we did that dinner? No, it must have been a little over a year ago.

• 1:22:46Mark Manson?

  Yeah, it was a little, it was like a year and a couple of months.

• 1:22:48Chris Williamson?

  Okay. And that was me as in the trenches as I've ever been.

• 1:22:54Mark Manson?

  You were going hard.

• 1:22:55Chris Williamson?

  Correct, yeah. And since then, have learned to back off a little bit. But in that, as you, as you take your foot off the gas or as you speed up, you sort of notice changes in life. And you could make an analogy to sort of acceleration or deceleration in things. You know, your net worth staying the same is kind of, uh, it's nothing. But it going up, it's like, ah, there's a change. And going down, fuck, you'll notice that too.

• 1:23:24Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:26Chris Williamson?

  One of the things that I noticed as I sort of purposefully tried to de, decelerate and delever some of the things that I was doing from then until now, which I've done real successfully, was I had to face an awful lot more of the things that my obsession with productivity and being busy were hiding in the fog.

• 1:23:48Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:48Chris Williamson?

  So, you know, my busyness was certainly a hedge against uncertainty and fear and a lack of importance and meaning in this desperate requirement for validation and a lack of self-esteem. It's like, How can I not be important? Look at how many calls I've got today. Like the world, the world need me. Look at how busy my calendar is.

• 1:24:09Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:10Chris Williamson?

  Like my calendar is so fucking busy. There's no way that I'm a worthless worthless piece of shit. It's impossible. It's simply impossible. So, yeah, sure. There may be some echoes of existential loneliness in the, in the background. But sorry, bro, I can't hear you. I'm blasting sleep token at a hundred and fifty decibels. Like, that was, a busy calendar was a hedge against existential loneliness for me. And it's a really good way to just continue to not, to not see the lies that you're telling yourself. Do you know, not have to face the fears, the sense of insufficiency, the scarcity mindset, all of that stuff. It's like, I'm so busy, bro, that I don't have time for that.

• 1:24:51Mark Manson?

  Totally.

• 1:24:52Chris Williamson?

  And as you, if you go, okay, I see that that's a pattern that almost everybody does. And I'm going to, I now have the opportunity maybe to choose to take my foot off the gas. You sort of feel that slowing as you kick forward and you go, okay.

• 1:25:08Chris Williamson?

  Why do I take my self-worth from now? Because I used to take it from there. And now I have to realize maybe me believing that my importance, my self-importance was bolstered by my level of busyness was a lie.

• 1:25:21Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:22Chris Williamson?

  Uh, and that's a, like, that's a fucking real.

• 1:25:26Mark Manson?

  It's a real thing.

• 1:25:27Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:27Mark Manson?

  For sure. And I, I, again, admitted workaholic here. Like, this is, this is something I struggle with too. The other thing I noticed, and I don't know, I'd be curious if this rings true for you. I've not been brought up to date on your, your dating life. Um, but it, like, I, I see in friends that, you know, they're like perpetually single and, or they like wanna settle down. But then they complain that like they, they can't find the right person. And I'm like, well, dude, you're on the road like six months a year. Like, when was the last time you saw the same person twice? And it's, I think, in some cases, it, that busyness.

• 1:26:08Mark Manson?

  Again, it kind of comes back to that strategic incompetence. It's like, oh, well, I can't figure out my dating life because I'm too busy.

• 1:26:15Chris Williamson?

  But it's a get out of jail free card.

• 1:26:17Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:17Chris Williamson?

  You've got, you've always got one foot out of the door. So if this thing doesn't work, well, it's not that much of a comment on my sense of self-worth because I wasn't that committed anyway. Like, yeah, yeah, it's not because I'm hopelessly bad at making somebody feel comfortable around me and scared of letting somebody see me. It's because I'm on the road six months at the end.

• 1:26:37Mark Manson?

  Yeah, totally. Yeah. I've seen that. I've seen that. I think I've done that, not in my intimate relationships, but I've done that in like, with like, social and family relationships, right? It's like, ah, yeah, sorry, I can't come home. I'm like touring Australia, you know? I'll see you next year.

• 1:26:57Chris Williamson?

  We missed each other by like three days, twice in Australia.

• 1:27:01Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:02Chris Williamson?

  Motherfuckers.

• 1:27:03Mark Manson?

  I know.

• 1:27:03Chris Williamson?

  We need to organize it better. That would have been cool. I think you did, I think you actually did the same.

• 1:27:07Mark Manson?

  We did the same cities.

• 1:27:08Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 1:27:09Mark Manson?

  But just in different orders. And I think a lot of people are just like, because I, there were people.

• 1:27:14Chris Williamson?

  Pick one? Pick both?

• 1:27:17Mark Manson?

  Well, I ran into a lot of people who were like at your show like the night before.

• 1:27:21Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, dude, what, imagine that for a weekend, a fucking Manson Williamson back to back, spit roasted by us two.

• 1:27:28Mark Manson?

  I was just gonna go there. Two podcast bros.

• 1:27:31Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, one fucking venue.

• 1:27:32Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:34Chris Williamson?

  The happiest people are not the ones with the most options, but the ones who stop questioning their choices.

• 1:27:39Mark Manson?

  This comes back to your point about uncertainty, right? And, and this is, this is, I think, where is at the foundation of the paradox of choices, is the paradox of choices. On the surface, you have more optionality, you have more things to choose from, you have more paths that you could go down. But that optionality itself generates more uncertainty because whichever path you pick, there's proportionally more uncertainty about whether that was the right path or not, whether you made the right choice or not, whether you could have made a better choice or not.

• 1:28:10Mark Manson?

  And so I think at a certain point, like if you really just boil it down to it, happiness comes down to being satisfied with what you've chosen.

• 1:28:22Mark Manson?

  Not trying to optimize it.

• 1:28:23Chris Williamson?

  Hmm hmm. That's a

• 1:28:28Chris Williamson?

  kind of like a, whatever it's called, golden handcuffs or a velvet prison where

• 1:28:34Chris Williamson?

  if the thing that you claim that you want to have happen in life happens, I get better options, I achieve success, people respect me, people want me, people need me, things are available to me. Okay, if that happens, if that happens, you are going to need to become increasingly good at saying no to an increasingly attractive number

• 1:28:57Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:57Chris Williamson?

  of an increasing quality of things that you could do with your life. And you're gonna have to become better at being able to be happy with the choice that you have made. Alex Hormozi talks about the woman in the red dress from Matrix.

• 1:29:11Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:11Chris Williamson?

  And he says, remember that scene, Neo's walking down the street and Morpheus turns to him and he says, Neo, were you looking at me? Are you looking at the woman in a red dress? Look again, and it's Agent Smith with a gun pointed at his face. And his analogy is, yeah, but now imagine that it was three years later and it's 1,000 hypothetical 1,000s, not one hypothetical 10.

• 1:29:35Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:35Chris Williamson?

  And you need to, I mean, what's your thing of, I shamelessly fucking nomenclatured it. I called it identity dysmorphia.

• 1:29:46Chris Williamson?

  Identity lags reality by one to two years.

• 1:29:48Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:49Chris Williamson?

  Is one of yours. So if you've got this identity, which everybody does, right? You just, you, you see in the mirror, the person that you used to see, the world sees some other version of you. And it takes a little bit of time for that version to catch up. So you are lagging behind the options. Your ability to discern options is lagging behind the options that the world is going to give you. And your ability to say no is fucking two, three years old. You're, all of this stuff. And yeah, the, the 1,000 hypothetical 1,000s in red dresses. And you need to go, I would have begged to have had the opportunity to have maybe said yes to this. And now I need to be pretty comfortable with saying no.

• 1:30:32Mark Manson?

  I, I, yeah.

• 1:30:34Chris Williamson?

  Crisis of success.

• 1:30:35Mark Manson?

  That totally tracks. And I'm trying to remember, Nassim Taleb had a quote around this that was something like, true wealth is measured by the money you turn down.

• 1:30:43Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 1:30:44Mark Manson?

  Which I just, oh.

• 1:30:45Chris Williamson?

  Morgan, Morgan Housel says, uh, uh, wealth is the Ferrari that you didn't buy.

• 1:30:49Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:49Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:30:50Mark Manson?

  Yeah. Um, but yeah, it's funny because I, I feel like good decision making at any point in life is primarily learned by making bad decisions. So whatever level you get to, there's a new set of bad decisions that you have to make to realize not to make them to get to the next level. And so again, it's just one of these tricks that your brain plays on you of like, oh, well, you know, if you make it, then you don't have to deal with this bullshit anymore. And so it's going to be easier. And it's like, well, no, no, there's a new level of bullshit that you've never been exposed to.

• 1:31:25Chris Williamson?

  Correct.

• 1:31:26Mark Manson?

  That is actually 10 times harder.

• 1:31:27Chris Williamson?

  Problems all the way up.

• 1:31:28Mark Manson?

  Exactly. It's problems all the way up and it's idiots all the way down.

• 1:31:31Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Uh, I think about that.

• 1:31:34Mark Manson?

  That'd be a good book title.

• 1:31:36Chris Williamson?

  Problems all the way up and idiots all the way down.

• 1:31:38Mark Manson?

  Or maybe not.

• 1:31:39Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. I, and so you, you come up maybe two or three times in my live show and one of the, one of the bits is it's idiots all the way up. So it's funny that you said it's idiots all the way down.

• 1:31:47Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:49Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. The, the ability to sort of become increasingly discerning. And Jeffrey Katzenberg, who sat there earlier on, you know, guy that fucking created Shrek and Aladdin and Lion King. I, he did like fucking Pretty Woman. This guy's a monster, like 800 movies, 80 animated things. And I asked him about, um, you are someone who, if you have one skill set, you're tasteful. Like you have good taste, the ability to discern between something that is good and something that is not good. Right? I taste very difficult to define, but that's the closest definition I can think of. He couldn't fucking define it. Like where does good taste come from? What is it?

• 1:32:28Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:29Chris Williamson?

  I don't fucking know.

• 1:32:30Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:30Chris Williamson?

  And when it comes to choices, so much of the time, we try and, again, that uncertainty, we abhor it so much that we would rather imagine a fantasy catastrophe than, uh, deal with something that's uncertain.

• 1:32:44Chris Williamson?

  The reason that you have your, you know, a spreadsheet of 15 countries ranked first by continent, then by temperature, then by air quality, then by women hotness.

• 1:32:55Mark Manson?

  You're hitting very close to home right now.

• 1:32:59Chris Williamson?

  Starting to shake with mid twenties anxiety.

• 1:33:03Mark Manson?

  Oh, God.

• 1:33:04Chris Williamson?

  The reason that you have that is to try and be, to provide some sort of control, some source of control. You go, fuck, like, I just, I'm, I'm so uncertain about my choices that if only I had more information. When really what it comes down to is just vibes. And, you know, I think we've both zeroed in on the show, your show and mine respectively, that it actually is increasingly about vibes. It's like, okay, what's the vibe that I'm bringing here? What's the sort of energy that I really want to put across in this thing? And sure, there'll be maybe some information, maybe it's useful, maybe it's not. But largely what people are going to take away is like, okay, so what was the vibe like?

• 1:33:44Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:44Chris Williamson?

  And being a vibe architect is an underrated, which is basically, you know, somebody that's discerning in taste, sort of.

• 1:33:51Mark Manson?

  A vibe architect, you should add that to your LinkedIn.

• 1:33:53Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, okay, yeah.

• 1:33:58Mark Manson?

  Yeah, no, it's totally true, though. It's, I had another thing that I wrote that went viral. It said that, I'm gonna probably fuck it up, but it was a, commitment is the, or no, love is the result, yeah, love is the result of commitment, not the cause, right? Like, you commit to something, then you start loving it, not the other way around, right? And it's similar to like, action and motivation, like, you don't, you take, taking action is what generates motivation, not, motivation doesn't generate action.

• 1:34:36Mark Manson?

  And similarly, committing to something is what makes you fall in love with it, not.

• 1:34:41Chris Williamson?

  Falling in love with something allows you to commit to it.

• 1:34:43Mark Manson?

  You don't go find the perfect country and fall in love with it and then be like, oh, I guess this is where I'm gonna live. It's like, no, you pick a fucking place to live, and then as you live there, you start to fall in love with it. That's just, that's how life works.

• 1:34:54Chris Williamson?

  The more you try to force what doesn't feel right, the longer you delay finding what does.

• 1:35:00Mark Manson?

  Yeah, I think talking about the discernment, I think it's

• 1:35:06Mark Manson?

  it's really

• 1:35:09Mark Manson?

  it's hard to develop the skill of knowing when you're bullshitting yourself. Like it's it's again, there's like layers to it, right? Like it's as soon as you figure out your mind's first level of tricks that it plays. There's like a whole nother level that

• 1:35:25Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you beat it at White Belt, but then it's it's like, fuck it graduated. God, now it knows leg locks and Kung Fu.

• 1:35:31Mark Manson?

  Exactly. It's just it's just layers of an onion, man. Like it's just it never you never stop finding novel ways to to kind of trick yourself and bullshit yourself. And you can drive yourself crazy.

• 1:35:46Mark Manson?

  You know, with the doubt and the questioning. Which again, I think is is is the a lot of the value that I took in Buddhism is that I think it's it's like kind of a mentally and emotionally healthy way to doubt yourself.

• 1:36:00Chris Williamson?

  You don't know, and you're never gonna know, and that's okay.

• 1:36:02Mark Manson?

  And it's okay. And why don't you sit on the mat and stare at a wall until you feel okay about it? And because otherwise, if you if you're kind of trying to go through life and asking, you're like constantly questioning everything all the time, like you're you're gonna work yourself up into this like neurotic ball of of anxiety and stress. So it's almost like mental hygiene to set aside an area of your life, whether it's journaling or therapy or meditation or whatever, and like give yourself that space to kind of just unwrap the layers of the onion. Like, okay, well, why do I think that's true? What if that wasn't true? What if I'm like lying to myself right now? What would that mean? Well,

• 1:36:43Mark Manson?

  how would what would that say about my life? And and kind of go the next layer down and the next layer down? And then when you're done, you know, put all the layers back and go, you know, go about your life. Try try try to try to human as best you can.

• 1:36:58Chris Williamson?

  You said about being in self conflict, and it makes me think about this sort of, especially for the sort of people that read your stuff, listen to my stuff, they are The prototypical avatar for a person who will be in conflict with themselves. They're introspective, they want to improve, they have high standards for a variety of things, many of which are in opposition with each other. You know, they want to be empathetic, but they want to be honest. They want to tell people the truth, but they want to care about them. They want to be supportive as a friend, but they need independence as an individual, blah, blah, blah. And I thought about, as you were talking there, you have self-conflict, but you have conflict with your self-conflict. Like, fuck, why am I always in conflict with myself?

• 1:37:43Mark Manson?

  Yep.

• 1:37:43Chris Williamson?

  Why does that keep on happening? And I think in some ways, this sort of non-attachment, you don't have it figured out, and that's okay. And you'll be okay. And this is the way it's going to be in perpetuity until you die. You go, okay, so maybe the self-conflict is going to be there because many of the things that we want are in tension with each other. And because of opportunity cost, you don't get to do two things.

• 1:38:06Mark Manson?

  Yep.

• 1:38:06Chris Williamson?

  Right? You want to support the mom and pop business that you were with from the very beginning, but you want to move to a new country. You're gonna feel guilty if you leave the mom and pop business, but you're gonna feel fucking regret if you don't go to the new country. Pick your fucking direction, Western man. And the same thing goes for your self-conflict. You think, fuck, like, I have these things, I'm going to be in tension with myself. But if I'm in tension with the fact that I'm in tension, that is, I have control over that second one at least. And so you could call it second order emotions. You know, someone gets frustrated.

• 1:38:38Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:38Chris Williamson?

  And then they become agitated at their frustration.

• 1:38:41Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:41Chris Williamson?

  And then they become resentful at their agitation about their frustration. It's this fucking infinite regress of emotions about emotions. And you go, yeah, I mean, the first one makes sense. That happens.

• 1:38:51Mark Manson?

  First one happens, you can't control it, but the

• 1:38:54Chris Williamson?

  The story?

• 1:38:55Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:55Chris Williamson?

  That you've told yourself about this?

• 1:38:57Mark Manson?

  I wrote a, I wrote a piece years ago, I don't even remember the title, so I can't even plug it, but I talked about this, I called them, I've been doing this a long time.

• 1:39:05Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:05Mark Manson?

  I, I call them meta-emotions.

• 1:39:07Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:39:07Mark Manson?

  Right? It's like feeling bad about feeling bad, or feeling bad about feeling good, which happens a lot to people. And

• 1:39:16Mark Manson?

  and essentially my argument is just like, try not to have meta emotion. Like, the emotions are always okay, and the meta emotions are kind of always not okay. Like, you, feeling good about feeling good, that, that turns into pride. Feeling bad about feeling good, that turns into guilt. Like, feeling bad about feeling bad, that turns into self-loathing. Like, it just

• 1:39:34Mark Manson?

  Don't judge the emotion. Just feel the thing. It's, it's okay. It's gonna be, whatever it is, it's gonna be okay.

• 1:39:39Chris Williamson?

  That's sick.

• 1:39:40Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:41Chris Williamson?

  I like that a lot. Trust people. Most of them are good. And while you might get hurt occasionally, the alternative of distrusting everyone is far worse.

• 1:39:52Mark Manson?

  Yeah, man. I, this ties into a lot of the stuff that we've been talking about. I, I look around and I think a lot of the, the struggles of people today, it is around

• 1:40:08Mark Manson?

  just trusting people, being comfortable. I, I, I just, I think our views of the median person in the world have gotten so skewed

• 1:40:18Mark Manson?

  by being online too much, by being on social media too much, by being overexposed to news media too much. Like, I just think if you actually get out in the world and, and talk to people face to face, even people you disagree with, even people who like you think are like the bad ones or whatever, nine times out of 10, they're good people. And you can pretty quickly find common ground and get along really well. And, um, you know, I used to be, uh, I used to be an esports gamer when I was a teenager.

• 1:40:55Chris Williamson?

  Mm hmm. I can imagine that.

• 1:40:57Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:58Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:58Mark Manson?

  And unlike Elon, I actually was.

• 1:41:02Mark Manson?

  Calling him out.

• 1:41:06Mark Manson?

  He, I got really pissed because he said that he was, he competed in one of the first Quake tournaments. And like, I actually went back to my old clan buddies and, and like, we looked it up and yeah, he wasn't in it.

• 1:41:15Chris Williamson?

  Oh.

• 1:41:16Mark Manson?

  Anyway.

• 1:41:19Mark Manson?

  My, my personal grievances aside. So there used to be a thing that happened back when I was like, I used to compete in these esports tournaments. And of course, being a bunch of like 16 year old nerds, we'd like sit and just talk shit to each other all the time online. Like, we'd play the game, practice against each other. And everybody just like talk mad shit to each other. And of course, it would devolve into like, oh, when I see you at the tournament, I'm gonna beat the fuck out of you. Oh, when I see you at the tournament, I'm gonna bring my boys. Beat the shit out of you, you know, you better be ready, all this stuff. And so every single tournament we went to, there was all this drama about like, oh, man, it's gonna go down here, like Chris and Mark are gonna fight, you know, it's gonna be sick. And then, of course, what happens, everybody shows up, everybody meets each other, everybody realizes that we're all like fat, nerdy, lonely dudes

• 1:42:03Mark Manson?

  who spend way too much time on their computers. And of course, we all go to McDonald's and be friends. And that happened over and over and over and over again. And so I, I feel like I learned at a very young age that there's just some sort of, there's some sort of like intangible softening that comes when you're face to face with people, that you're in the same room with them, the micro expressions, the body language, the tonality. Like, there's a, there's a certain amount of empathy and compassion that spontaneously emerges in the physical space that doesn't happen in the digital space. And I, I just feel as the world becomes more and more chronically online, I just, I, I feel like so many of our issues like really just boil down to that.

• 1:42:48Mark Manson?

  I'm friends with a, one of the preeminent happiness researchers out here. Her name's Sonia Lubomirsky and her lab just did a great woman, super smart. And her lab just did a new study. It still hasn't been published yet, it's in pre publishing, but it was interesting. They looked at a classic case, social media and happiness, smartphones, social media and happiness, and how they correlate, whatever. And interestingly, like a lot of research around social media and happiness,

• 1:43:19Mark Manson?

  when you look at adults, it doesn't have that much of an effect.

• 1:43:26Mark Manson?

  The smartphones had a negative correlation with happiness. But what was interesting is that in the way they measured it, basically, the way she summarized it was like, the smartphones causing greater unhappiness was not because of the smartphone. It was because of what the smartphone was replacing, which was this. Just sitting in a room together, talking and like actually empathizing, actually being like, okay, I don't want to agree with that, but you're a good guy. So, you know, let's have another beer. You know, like it's, it's that sort of casualness to everything that somehow gets distorted or lost.

• 1:44:05Mark Manson?

  So I don't remember like what you said that got me on this.

• 1:44:08Chris Williamson?

  You were talking about quake.

• 1:44:11Mark Manson?

  I don't know.

• 1:44:13Chris Williamson?

  The more that you try to force what doesn't feel right, the longer you delay finding what does. Maybe it was that. Oh, trust people.

• 1:44:19Mark Manson?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 1:44:19Chris Williamson?

  Most of them are good.

• 1:44:20Mark Manson?

  Trusting people. So I, I, I think a lot of trust.

• 1:44:25Mark Manson?

  It seems to spontaneously emerge.

• 1:44:29Mark Manson?

  From, from the in person is right. And so. Again, to the point about. The asymmetry of trust, how damaging that is both for our institutions, our society, but also our personal relationships. Like if you can't trust somebody, you can't really have intimacy with them.

• 1:44:49Mark Manson?

  I, I think it, I just think it's all related. And so that, that post is just like a shout into the void of like.

• 1:44:58Mark Manson?

  Please, people, like just trust each other.

• 1:45:00Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:00Mark Manson?

  Just err on the side of trust. Sure, you're going to get hurt sometimes, but. The alternative is worse.

• 1:45:07Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, there's a, a lovely insight from Naval. Karma doesn't need spirits to deliver justice. Karma is just you repeating your patterns, virtues and flaws until you finally get what you deserve. And that's kind of the same thing with, with trust that like dude, like if someone is that much of an asshole. They're probably going to get found out sooner or later because there's only so many times that you can roll the dice. And that thing happened. And you not get, you not get found out for it if it's bad, or you not get found out for it if it's good. So you didn't accumulate the negative reputation and you didn't accumulate the positive reputation. For so long, and maybe some people can dance through the minefield of life and be an asshole to.

• 1:45:53Chris Williamson?

  Everyone that they meet and arrive at their deathbed and no one really realize, but that's like some. 7,000 IQ Samurai bullshit to be able to make that work. And I just don't think, I don't think that most people are going to do that. So yeah, I think.

• 1:46:05Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:05Chris Williamson?

  And as well.

• 1:46:08Chris Williamson?

  There is certainly a trend in the modern world of I don't need anybody. I've been hurt before and that hurt was because of my trust. Therefore, the issue wasn't the person that I placed my trust in, but the act of trust itself.

• 1:46:24Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 1:46:25Chris Williamson?

  I think that's an equation that gets

• 1:46:26Mark Manson?

  That happens quite a bit.

• 1:46:27Chris Williamson?

  Run.

• 1:46:28Mark Manson?

  Yeah. And it's, that's completely self defeating, right? It's like, I got hurt because I didn't get the intimacy or love that I crave. So I'm just gonna stop pursuing intimacy and love. Like, that makes no sense. And I don't know how or why that's become particularly fashionable. I just, it strikes me as incredibly self defeating.

• 1:46:52Chris Williamson?

  In the game of life, he who has the smallest ego usually wins. Why?

• 1:46:58Mark Manson?

  Well, it depends how you define wins.

• 1:47:02Mark Manson?

  But

• 1:47:05Mark Manson?

  I think in terms of just well being. I mean, you kind of just alluded to it yourself. You know, you can have that super samurai manipulative asshole who's cheating everybody and stealing and lying to everybody all the time. But like, that's, they're probably miserable. They're probably incredibly dark, lonely,

• 1:47:28Mark Manson?

  miserable people. And, and I just think all of this stuff that we're talking about, whether it's the authenticity or, you know, finding a way for your cup to overflow and finding a mission in your productivity. Like, all of this stuff, it like demands a, a certain humbling of yourself. And I think in a way too, it's just like choosing fear is a form of ego.

• 1:47:56Chris Williamson?

  Like, how do you define ego?

• 1:48:00Mark Manson?

  That's a good question. I, in this context, I would say it is

• 1:48:07Mark Manson?

  an over importance of self, like an aggrandized sense of self.

• 1:48:15Mark Manson?

  I do think having some ego or healthy egos is natural and important. But I just think it's, it's

• 1:48:25Mark Manson?

  All this stuff that we're talking about, this like low level delusions and misconceptions and distrust of people and choosing fear over confidence, like all of it kind of boils back to like feeding this aggrandized sense of self of like, I deserve so much, I'm so special, I, I want all these things in the world and I'm gonna be so upset if I don't get them. And like, all of that really just boils down to like a a misrepresentation of your own importance, I guess. What's a better perspective? I think a better perspective is, is understanding that

• 1:49:12Mark Manson?

  everything comes with a trade-off, that life is, is messy and painful, loss is inevitable, but that doesn't mean that the thing you lost wasn't worth it. And that anything you pursue or desire, like, you can't just pursue or desire the positive side of it, you also have to pursue and desire the negative side of it. Like, you have to, if there's some goal in your life or some dream you have, you can't just dream about the benefits of that dream. You're also signing up for the costs of that dream. You're signing up for the struggles, the failures, the setbacks, the embarrassments. And the mind is just

• 1:49:54Mark Manson?

  very bad at doing that. It's bad at holding two sides of a trade-off and, at the same time. We tend to see, when we, when we create these narratives about the future, about what we want or what we don't want, we tend to only see what's bad about it, or only see what's good about it. We don't see the full trade-off. We don't see like, oh, if I start a new company, I'm gonna have to give up some of my social life and some of my time at home. And so I need to be ready for that. It's like, no, we just think that, oh, that stupid fucking company, it like messed up my life and, you know.

• 1:50:40Mark Manson?

  What a mistake. I shouldn't have done that. Or my co-founder is an asshole. Or like, whatever, right? It's like, it's, it's their fault. It's, you know, blame everybody else. So

• 1:50:50Mark Manson?

  I think it's, uh, viewing optionality in terms of, of the costs of like the emotional costs.

• 1:50:56Chris Williamson?

  Have you read much Oliver Berkman?

• 1:50:58Mark Manson?

  I love Oliver's stuff. Yeah.

• 1:50:59Chris Williamson?

  He's fucking king, dude.

• 1:51:01Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:01Chris Williamson?

  His newsletter, The Imperfectionist, is, uh, it's the same as that Tim Urban thing. New posts every sometimes. It's like on no fucking discernible cadence. And it's like, he's,

• 1:51:16Chris Williamson?

  Oliver Berkman's newsletter is like the three body problem of publishing.

• 1:51:22Chris Williamson?

  You know, it's like, when the fuck is it coming? I don't think you know, and neither can, no one can predict. But, um, he has this idea from 4,000 Weeks, which is, uh, choose what you're going to suck at.

• 1:51:31Mark Manson?

  Yep.

• 1:51:31Chris Williamson?

  Uh, you know, choose in advance the thing that you're going to suck at because, um, opportunity cost demands trade offs. There are no solutions, only trade offs. So I want to find a partner. Okay. You're probably going to have to sacrifice some time in the gym. You're not going to be, you're going to be going out on dates. Are you going to events? Maybe some late nights, maybe some early mornings, maybe some coffee breaks and stuff like that. Uh, probably not going to maximize your finances. Maybe you're going to have to pay for Ubers and dinners, uh, trips and stuff like that. Okay, I, I really want to make as much money as possible. It's like, okay, your social life's probably going to suck.

• 1:52:05Mark Manson?

  Yep.

• 1:52:05Chris Williamson?

  For a bit. And, uh, you maybe not going to get to hang with your friends so much. Okay. So I think by, in advance of that, especially for the perennial type A fucking optimizer people, uh, which, me,

• 1:52:19Chris Williamson?

  you have to say, this is a price I'm willing to pay in order to achieve this other thing that I want. And it's not forever. And that's a, what, I don't know whether it's like personal growth, hyperbolic discounting or something. But our ability to understand that the decisions that we're making right now are just for right now. You know, not just for this second, you know, if you're going to make, commit to a habit, make it a couple of months, but, okay, I'm going to get in shape. All right. Well, that's going to take between three and three months and 12 months, something like that for most people. Okay, why get in shape? What am I, what's the price I'm gonna have to pay, what I'm gonna suck at during that time? Oh, you know, I'm probably gonna have to spend more money on going to the gym and, and buying better food and probably not gonna have much of a social life because I'm gonna

• 1:53:01Chris Williamson?

  need to really lock in on diet and I'm gonna have to like be socially awkward at dinners, the few that I do get to attend and I'm gonna have to say, oh, sorry, like I'm just having a steak this evening or whatever it might be. Okay. By doing that, when the price comes of the suck, it doesn't feel like this comment on your self-worth is a person that's being ripped away from you. Oh, my God, how can I, I'm not gonna be able to deal with the thing that's happening. It's like, no, no, no. Okay, this is an indication that things are going well.

• 1:53:28Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:28Chris Williamson?

  Actually, okay, this is something that you priced in and this is a cost that you're prepared to, to go through in order to be able to achieve it. Uh, but yeah, for a very, very long time, I would take my eye off the ball of a thing to focus on another thing. And the second that this thing started to slip, I'd be like, okay, I get back into that. Yeah. It's like one of those cats chasing a laser around.

• 1:53:47Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:47Chris Williamson?

  You know what I mean? It's like up, up, up, up, up, up, up.

• 1:53:50Mark Manson?

  Yeah. I think pricing in is like a good term for it because it's, it's, because ultimately it is the value of something, right? Like if you are, if you do have a goal or pursuit or something that you want in your life, obviously you perceive there to be a certain amount of value to it. And the same way, you wouldn't just look at a stock and be like, well, how much money did they make last year? Cool. Let me buy it for this amount. Like you, you need to look at both sides of the spreadsheet. You need to look at how much money they brought in and the expenses and the costs and also like what are the future risks and like do the full analysis, three sixty. But we're just really bad at that with ourselves.

• 1:54:30Mark Manson?

  Like we don't think in those terms. And I, I think ultimately it's because generally our, our, our hopes and dreams are very emotionally driven. They're very identity driven. And that part of our brain is the more ancient mammalian part of our brain, right? And it doesn't, it kind of short circuits the prefrontal cortex and like, you know, you, you don't really want to act like think through second and third order effects about, uh, you know, the, your, your dream home or, uh, like that girl you're really into. And it's, so it's hard. It's, it's like incredibly hard to do it.

• 1:55:11Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I wish. I don't know, it it it's sort of a ruthless irony that the times when you need your prefrontal cortex the most are the ones when it seems to be switched off.

• 1:55:24Mark Manson?

  Yeah, yeah, it's um.

• 1:55:29Mark Manson?

  I think I had another thing I I I posted a few years ago where I said it was like uh the the most consequential choice you'll make in your life is is who you choose as a partner and uh and I I went through this whole list of things, you know, it's like there'll be your counselor, your roommate, your business partner, your financial advisor, your teacher, your lover, your travel buddy, like whole list. And then I finished it by saying like, and yet, most people uh put as much thought into it as like, you know, the color of their iPhone case. Like, it's just some people, they're like, oh, I like this one.

• 1:56:02Chris Williamson?

  I happened upon it.

• 1:56:03Mark Manson?

  Yeah, yeah, it's like, oh, she's nice. She's kind of hot.

• 1:56:05Chris Williamson?

  The more that I learn about the way that the uh human attachment system works, uh passionate to companion, it loved specifically. Um a combination of Taito Shiro, who's fucking unbelievable, and Arthur Brooks, who's also fucking unbelievable. Those two guys together, like a two-car garage of really, really fucking understanding uh human mating for like a psychological sense, I guess, and a neurobiological sense. And so many, the the way that human uh attraction and attachment works is it blinds you to this person's flaws. It causes you to feel unbelievably intense emotions about them whilst knowing very little about them.

• 1:56:44Chris Williamson?

  Uh, real ruthless one that I learned from William Costello, uh when you're in passionate love, the honeymoon phase.

• 1:56:51Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:52Chris Williamson?

  Uh, you, your brain actively disengages from being able to see other available options. So it it's sort of brings this sort of mating blinkers on, which is why friends that are still in the the honeymoon phase, but it's with somebody that's really not good for them. You say, but do you like, you could get like a million other amazing women. And they're like, no, man, I'll never get anybody like her. And she's like, she sucks.

• 1:57:19Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:20Chris Williamson?

  And yes, you will. And your last girl was better than this girl. And how how are you so like functionally idiotic? I know that you're normally irrational. Oh, okay, you're kind of on drugs. Well, you mean, you are on drugs. You're just on endogenous drugs.

• 1:57:36Mark Manson?

  Exactly.

• 1:57:36Chris Williamson?

  As opposed to exogenous ones. And um, yeah, I think so many people.

• 1:57:42Chris Williamson?

  Uh, spend time with somebody where they

• 1:57:48Chris Williamson?

  love the smell of their hair and the shape of their nose and the way that they feel when they cuddle them at night. And they fall backward into a relationship that they didn't with the person they don't actually have that much in common with.

• 1:58:02Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:02Chris Williamson?

  And um, it is a really ruthless trick that the human attachment system plays on you. To get you to bond to this person.

• 1:58:11Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:12Chris Williamson?

  In spite of their flaws.

• 1:58:13Mark Manson?

  Yes. And then of course, that that bond or that passionate love wears off after a certain amount of years.

• 1:58:20Chris Williamson?

  You wake up being married and living in the same house with the golden retriever together.

• 1:58:24Mark Manson?

  Yeah, completely financially enmeshed with like two kids and you're like, oh shit, I have nothing in common with this person.

• 1:58:30Chris Williamson?

  You know, you bring your head above the water of this hormonal fugue state. And you're like, what the fuck was that fever dream that I just came out of?

• 1:58:35Mark Manson?

  It's a, I mean, it's another example of just like how evolution did not optimize for happiness or harmony. Like it optimized.

• 1:58:43Chris Williamson?

  For babies, making babies. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh, it is very effective. I mean, it's, it's hilarious in some ways, but I think a good lesson there is be careful who you let yourself fall in love with. You know, you, you almost need to treat you in love as kind of like a child. It's like, if I allowed this to happen, I won't be able to use my rational brain. So while I still have a tenuous hold on my sanity, allow me to try and make judgments carefully. How long are we going to spend with this person? And I need to make decisions probably pretty quickly while I'm still, you know, in rational mode and not speed running through attachment.

• 1:59:28Chris Williamson?

  Because once you're in it, it's like, you're, you're lost.

• 1:59:31Mark Manson?

  Well, and this is another argument for what you were talking about earlier of like front load your identity as much as possible.

• 1:59:38Chris Williamson?

  Try and try and do everything you can to put them off.

• 1:59:40Mark Manson?

  Right. Exactly. Like just be as much of yourself as possible.

• 1:59:43Chris Williamson?

  Maximize you.

• 1:59:44Mark Manson?

  Early on, because it's, it's, that's when you're going to find out. Like if you, if you hold yourself back and then you fall into this just love bucket of hormones and neurotransmitters, then you know, you, you might be screwed. It's, it's super cliche advice, but I remember at my wedding, all the old people gave the exact same advice, like all the old couples that have been together for like 40, 50, 60 years. They all give the exact same advice, which is like. Put the friendship first.

• 2:00:13Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. What's that mean?

• 2:00:15Mark Manson?

  Basically, they all said, they're like, look, you're married now, there's gonna be good years, there's gonna be bad years, there's gonna be romantic times, there's gonna be non-romantic times, there's gonna be

• 2:00:27Mark Manson?

  difficult points in your life, there's gonna be really great points in your life, like, put the friendship first, because that's gonna carry you through everything.

• 2:00:38Mark Manson?

  Everything else is gonna come and go, and you'll have, you'll, you'll have patience at different times.

• 2:00:45Mark Manson?

  But if you're not friends, you're not gonna have the patience to wait.

• 2:00:48Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. I feel like most cultural and mental health issues these days can be summed up in just two words, performative victimhood.

• 2:00:59Mark Manson?

  That one did not perform well, as I recall.

• 2:01:01Chris Williamson?

  Ah, people don't usually like liking a tweet that says that they're performative victims.

• 2:01:05Mark Manson?

  Yeah, a little, little bit called out. I don't, I'm trying to remember what inspired that.

• 2:01:12Mark Manson?

  But

• 2:01:14Mark Manson?

  I do believe that, I do believe, I mean, this comes back to the therapy culture thing

• 2:01:21Mark Manson?

  of

• 2:01:23Mark Manson?

  people adopt as values what they get validated for, right? Like, they, they

• 2:01:30Mark Manson?

  if perceiving themselves as a victim is what brings them attention and sympathy and adoration, then

• 2:01:39Mark Manson?

  it will encourage that behavior further. Like, we're monkeys, you know, it's, it's like Pavlov's bell.

• 2:01:47Chris Williamson?

  If you reward me for something, I'm gonna keep doing it.

• 2:01:49Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 2:01:50Chris Williamson?

  I remember when I was running nightclubs, I just used to get pissed off. There's a couple of other companies in Newcastle and the northeast of the UK, sort of classic, working class mindset, like, very wily, shrewd, like, not intellectually sophisticated, but uh, relationally, socially genius people, and

• 2:02:15Chris Williamson?

  You have one goal, busy nightclub, right? If you make your nightclub busy, you're the kings. If your nightclub is not busy, you're the fucking idiot. And I always used to get pissed off at some of the other companies that would make claims,

• 2:02:33Chris Williamson?

  disparaging claims, there was no such thing as slander, right? You can say that this person's night, someone got glassed and it had three people in it and all of them had one leg and they were, you know, they were upside down with a gluten intolerance, shitting everywhere. You know, whatever, whatever you wanted to say in order to make somebody else's event. But this was a game that we refused to play. And me and my business partner had a principle where we're like, we don't talk shit about other people's nights. And I always used to feel like it was unfair because we were constrained by what actually happened. But our competitors were simply constrained by what they could get away with saying and be believable. And I kind of get the sense that it's similar with this performative victimhood thing,

• 2:03:18Chris Williamson?

  which is if the way that you accumulate status, notoriety, recognition, validation from the world is through you doing a thing, your capacity to get the validation is constrained by your capacity to do the thing. But if it's simply through the performance of grievance, imagined or real, you disguise the fucking limit, dude. You know, like if you're the LeBron James of pretending to be a victim, that skill set is significantly easier to acquire than being LeBron James and doing it through being in basketball. You know, the, the, the athlete who's perpetually injured, right?

• 2:03:57Chris Williamson?

  Or is always, you know, brief flashes of being good, but then gets the yips. Or I don't know what the equivalent is in, in America, like gets in their own head and is unable to perform, can't perform in like clutch situations.

• 2:04:12Chris Williamson?

  Like that is. Kind of romantic in some way. Imagine what he could have been. It's like, yeah, but he fucking wasn't.

• 2:04:18Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:19Chris Williamson?

  Dude, like ultimately, he wasn't that thing, even you know, as brutal as it is, as somebody that sometimes gets injured doing lifting heavy things, like if you are the sort of athlete who gets injured, that is also the same thing for you too, that well, imagine how great he could have been. Well, yeah, but his body wasn't built to be that great because every time that somebody hit him from the left, his knee gave out or whatever it might be. And I, if you have an easy route to, another example of this, so this would have been me, not necessarily performative victimhood, but certainly me leaning into fear as opposed to confidence.

• 2:04:54Chris Williamson?

  When you play cricket, there is a, something called a TFC and it's a thanks for coming. Thanks for coming means that you didn't bat and you didn't bowl. All that you did was field, uh, because everybody fields. And it's a like nod to what the captain would say at the end of the game when he's chucking and he was like, thanks for coming, mate. Uh, because you didn't, you didn't contribute. Um, and having a TFC is kind of a bit of a fucking waste of a weekend. What did you do? Uh, you couldn't have contributed that much to the game. Presumably you batted what's referred to as down the order. So you're one of the later batsmen. And if you were a bowler, you weren't needed, or the conditions weren't right for you, or the captain didn't have confidence in your ability to deliver at this stage of the game. And, um, there was a bit of me in the back of my mind that thought,

• 2:05:37Chris Williamson?

  if I have the opportunity to have a TFC, at least I can't fail. Because I'm not faced, I would rather assure my failure privately than risk failure publicly. Because I'm insulated from other people having to see how I could have fallen short potentially. And you know, that would, depending on how confident I was, sometimes that would be more like, I really want this and I would lean into it. And other times it would be fear and I'd be like, kind of, you know, I got off scuff, oh yeah, I really fell up for it this weekend. God, if you'd got me in there, you feel, you could have seen the runs that I would have got on the board.

• 2:06:11Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:11Chris Williamson?

  But, uh, yeah, the performative victimhood thing, I think between that, the, um, if you're not constrained by reality, you can, uh, become anything that you want to be as long as you can get away with claiming it.

• 2:06:24Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:25Chris Williamson?

  Uh, and also this insulation privately.

• 2:06:28Mark Manson?

  I, I also like, I think there's some, there is a cultural norm that has shifted

• 2:06:36Mark Manson?

  probably since you and I were kids. And I don't totally understand why or where it shifted, but.

• 2:06:43Mark Manson?

  It.

• 2:06:46Mark Manson?

  I think there's, there's a certain amount of virtue has been, started being ascribed to victimhood.

• 2:06:52Mark Manson?

  I think if I think back to like, say, my, what my parents were growing up or my grandparents were growing up. It was the opposite. It was like, if you felt like a victim or complained about something, it was like, ah, suck it up. You know, rub some dirt on it, you know, get over yourself, that sort of thing.

• 2:07:09Mark Manson?

  And then it feels like at some point, there's kind of like an overcorrection, right? Like, of course, you want to acknowledge people who have had unfortunate things happen to them, or maybe something's gone wrong, or they've been treated unfairly, or there's an injustice. But

• 2:07:23Mark Manson?

  at some point along the way,

• 2:07:26Mark Manson?

  victimhood in and of itself has become seen as like a virtuous thing. And you can, I think everybody's got their favorite pet groups that they can point to and like, say, you know, as an, as an example, but like, I see it all over the place. I see it's like, I think I, I wrote in one of my books, I said, I think this is the first time in history that literally every demographic feels aggrieved and persecuted. Like, rich people feel persecuted right now. Poor people feel persecuted. White people feel persecuted. Black people feel persecuted.

• 2:07:56Chris Williamson?

  Stripes.

• 2:07:56Mark Manson?

  Straight people, people feel persecuted. Gay people feel persecuted. Like, how is this fucking po- who's persecuting? Like, how is this possible?

• 2:08:04Chris Williamson?

  It's the Spider-Man meme.

• 2:08:05Mark Manson?

  Yeah, exactly. That's exactly, we live in a Spider-Man meme world right now and

• 2:08:11Mark Manson?

  and I don't totally understand how it's happened. And I think in, in a sense, I think empathy has been weaponized.

• 2:08:21Mark Manson?

  Both politically, but also socially.

• 2:08:25Mark Manson?

  That it's people kind of walk around with a badge of honor of like,

• 2:08:31Mark Manson?

  I've been mistreated, or the group I'm a part of has been mistreated and that makes me, that affords me all sorts of, you know, regard and respect that I didn't necessarily earn or do anything for.

• 2:08:44Mark Manson?

  So yeah, I just, I see that as kind of the root. You know, because you, we could sit here and we won't, but we could sit here and talk about political issues all day and different social and cultural norms and issues that have been changing all day. But really, at the, at the ground level of it, I just, I see this performative victimhood as, as a trend that is just like very fundamental and it's across the board, across demographics, and it is like very worrying.

• 2:09:18Chris Williamson?

  I wonder whether part of it is a little bit of a sense of inequality and inequality can be due to empathy as well. If you have people who feel like they're being mistreated in one way or another, that they're, you are not recognizing the prices that I pay, whether I'm the rich person or the white person or the gay person or whatever, or three.

• 2:09:41Chris Williamson?

  That sense of, uh, I want to be seen, I want my suffering to be recognized and I feel like it's not, starts to incentivize and it also resonates with other people who go, huh, I don't think that my suffering has been seen or has been recognized. They're just like me.

• 2:10:03Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:03Chris Williamson?

  And I wonder whether it taps into this, um, yeah, uh, righteous lack of recognition that, that many people feel like they're a part of.

• 2:10:12Mark Manson?

  Yeah. I think there's also a lot of, uh, I believe it's the fallacy of composition that goes on, which is like, you will see, you'll go online and you'll see, say, one terrible thing happened to one, since we're both white guys, we'll say, terrible thing happens to one white guy. And because we're white guys, we're like, oh my God, look at what they're doing to all the white guys, right? And so there's like this, this like logical fallacy that happens, but you just get, you're like.

• 2:10:45Mark Manson?

  Your limbic system gets hijacked by the headline and the horrible video that you see on TikTok or whatever and you're just like, oh my God, we're under attack.

• 2:10:54Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, fuck. Mark, you're awesome, dude.

• 2:10:57Mark Manson?

  Thanks, dude.

• 2:10:58Chris Williamson?

  I think your work is phenomenal and I shamelessly repurpose it regularly.

• 2:11:02Mark Manson?

  I appreciate your shameless repurposing.

• 2:11:04Chris Williamson?

  Good. I'm plagiarizing you with credit all the time. You got a new app? You got new stuff? Where should people go to check out all the things you do?

• 2:11:12Mark Manson?

  I'm on every social platform. Check out my podcast, Solved. Posting on YouTube all the time, so come check it out.

• 2:11:20Chris Williamson?

  Everyone should. And your newsletter is also sick, so people should go and check that out. Until next time, dude. I appreciate you.

• 2:11:26Speaker 02

  Close your eyes, exhale, feel your body relax, and let go of whatever you're carrying today.

• 2:11:33Speaker 03

  Well, I'm letting go of the worry that I wouldn't get my new contacts in time for this class. I got them delivered free from 1-800-CONTACTS. Oh my gosh, they're so fast. And breathe. Oh, sorry. I almost couldn't breathe when I saw the discount they gave me on my first order. Oh, sorry. Namaste. Visit 1-800-CONTACTS.com today to save on your first order.

• 2:11:54Speaker 02

  1-800-CONTACTS.